I'm assuming this is vibe coded, because it's got a bunch of the usual tells, so to the people who do this: can you please stop making stupid scrolling presentations where I can see less than a slide of information at a time? Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead, or better yet, write it yourself.
giancarlostoro 53 minutes ago [-]
My corporate firewall blocked this due to it being a newly registered domain.
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.
wnmurphy 26 minutes ago [-]
Then are you qualified to tell the world what you think about the post? :-)
cactusplant7374 21 minutes ago [-]
Next time they should run it by your company before they decide to create a new domain.
quantified 43 minutes ago [-]
Having read plenty of 1970's and 1980's sci-fi, I feel that clanker is the perfect term.
re-thc 29 minutes ago [-]
> Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead
You're right to push back on that. Let me get the details instead of hand waving.
visha1v 60 minutes ago [-]
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grassfedgeek 55 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
SiempreViernes 50 minutes ago [-]
You know there's like an entire generation of devs raised hearing "copyright violations are theft, don't do it, it's band"? Unsurprisingly many of these people indeed think that when Anthropic and OpenAI does industrial scale copyright theft that's bad.
Also, calling most of humanity "stupid" is pretty stupid.
ceejayoz 51 minutes ago [-]
An AI design is an imperfect hint that the copy may also be similarly generated.
slopinthebag 52 minutes ago [-]
Because a lot of us don’t want to see AI slop and it’s very useful to have that pointed out in the comments before I waste time clicking on the link and slowly coming to that realization myself.
shimman 55 minutes ago [-]
eh, am very biased as I design similar sites but I honestly prefer these to what would be likely string of random social media posts.
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.
panzi 21 minutes ago [-]
While I'm not that against to such a web page (when viewing it on a monitor, not a phone) I'd say follow these points:
• 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.
nemomarx 12 minutes ago [-]
I want it to be something you could reproduce in print, though. As close to what I'd get putting it in reader mode as possible.
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
kylehotchkiss 42 minutes ago [-]
> Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post
lol
themgt 27 minutes ago [-]
It's funny it concludes "A line is not a law" while the entire page is just lines and charts. If you didn't know anything going in, SpaceX might as well be a company selling toilet paper for all you learned.
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."
nemomarx 11 minutes ago [-]
They aren't being valued on the rockets, though, they're claiming a large TAM based on the ai portion.
if I could invest in just the rockets that would be cool. much less downside risk
iterance 12 minutes ago [-]
All things equal I would agree with you. However, all things are not equal.
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.)
SXX 1 hours ago [-]
You never know what inflation gonna be in futute. In some countries that turned into autocracies with strong and long standing leaders who love traditional values and religion inflation can easily be 30-70% a year.
Then not only 4.3T reachable, but even 43T.
1 hours ago [-]
SecretDreams 32 minutes ago [-]
This is true. We just need to bank on a total economic collapse and all of our SpaceX valuation fantasies can come true.
thatmf 1 hours ago [-]
> Donald Trump said “I love the inflation” after new data showed that inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high.
at that inflation rate the US dollar would lose its reserve currency status so I doubt it
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.
mohamedkoubaa 51 minutes ago [-]
Reserve currency status is already doomed it's a matter of when not if
bitmasher9 12 minutes ago [-]
It’s always been a matter of when.
scottyah 58 minutes ago [-]
I get the feeling that in 5yrs or so if China makes the yuan free-floating it will be more of a reserve currency.
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.
soperj 46 minutes ago [-]
> All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now
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.
mullingitover 37 minutes ago [-]
Some principled people left when he made his big heel turn into openly promoting ethnonationalist authoritarianism.
Pretty sure some other principled people stayed behind and are using the field manual[1].
Sorry, but I'm not pricing a stock today based on the assumption that this country will turn into a theocratic autocracy with a 70% YoY inflation rate for 15 years.
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.
marcosdumay 1 hours ago [-]
Nothing the GP said makes SpaceX a better stock. It would just make the promise technically true in a way that doesn't benefit any investor.
Or, in other words, it's a joke.
bluGill 1 hours ago [-]
If inflation is really that high I'm buying hard assets that won't depreciate. Sure I will need some cash, but gold bars in my personal safe suddenly are a great investment (gold is generally a terrible investment, but when inflation is the main concern is is really good)
threetonesun 45 minutes ago [-]
Until SpaceX finds that golden asteroid.
scottyah 1 hours ago [-]
But these insane valuations are leading the tide-rising. This is one instrument in inflation because it's "creating" this money from nothing. All the employees that got a $5k bonus 5yrs ago will see it rise to $50k (or more) out of thin air (crazy financial mechanisms).
voidfunc 1 hours ago [-]
Will? It already has turned into one.
sieabahlpark 15 minutes ago [-]
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1 hours ago [-]
sidewndr46 1 hours ago [-]
Isn't SpaceX uniquely in the position to benefit from that kind of government?
Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce
logancbrown 1 hours ago [-]
This comment is very clearly an exaggeration even if there is a grain of truth to it. You should consider addressing the fact that there can be multiple "leaders" at any given time, and geopolitical boundaries can shape those leaders.
raincole 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps at least wait until Long March proves to be recyclable/reuseable before you call it a direct competitor.
bilbo0s 1 hours ago [-]
Well, SpaceX is supposed to be more about AI than low cost orbital launches. At least that’s what their roadshow is claiming.
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.
scottyah 55 minutes ago [-]
We've seen through Tesla that software, government regulation, and to a smaller degree build quality are the only moats against China that still currently hold.
CursedSilicon 32 minutes ago [-]
Tesla build quality? Early Chinese EV's were a joke, but Tesla's aren't exactly built reliably either
Once you learn how to spot their misaligned panels it becomes impossible not to
Isamu 1 hours ago [-]
China has multiple reusable rocket programs, the reuse will become key to driving down costs.
downrightmike 51 minutes ago [-]
yeah, and it will slice $T off of spacex easily
re-thc 1 hours ago [-]
> Spacex is going to get rekt, China has all the materials and workforce
According to their brief, most of the revenue is going to come from AI!
The rockets are apparently just "minor" now.
ActionHank 1 hours ago [-]
That must be a mistake, revenue isn't the word for the money you're going to throw in the furnace.
guywithahat 1 hours ago [-]
It's possible SpaceX will get "rekt", but the US has decades of experience and manufacturing processes set up for aerospace, as well as established customers. As long as SpaceX doesn't become heavily unionized I suspect they'll be able to compete strongly with anything China develops.
panzi 7 minutes ago [-]
The animated graphics are fancy, but can anyone with a screen reader tell us how that "looks" to them? The graphics are all one SVG mixed together with different parts set to opacity: 0. The accessibility tree in Firefox gives you all the labels randomly mixed together. If that is how people with screen reader "see" it, its unusable.
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.
conductr 7 minutes ago [-]
It's insane to me that regulators are just letting the forced bid hack unfold with their heads in the sand as if they are unaware of what's happening or the press it's receiving.
Sometimes there are clever ways to hack the system and the regulators can react and blame poor hindsight, that's not the case here.
mentalfist 1 hours ago [-]
It's amazing we're in a timeline were people let stuff like this happen, against any sane logic.
Avshalom 9 minutes ago [-]
To Be Fair: this is half of what Morgan Stanley said the metaverse would be worth, clearly they learned to be more bearish...
notorandit 36 minutes ago [-]
Please, correct the typo in the title!
eggplantemoji69 1 hours ago [-]
Isn’t like 90% of their predicted revenue due to their AI products?
maxglute 4 minutes ago [-]
The chance of US debasing currency to dig out of debt hole by brrrrting money printer is not zero.
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.
0xbadcafebee 30 minutes ago [-]
I don't think some people understand how money works. If you say you're going to have $3.4T in revenue, someone has to have that money, and give it to you. So where is the money? Who has it? Are they spending it somewhere else right now, and will decide to instead spend it on SpaceX later? Or is the money just sitting in savings accounts, strangely not being spent or invested?
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.
kridsdale1 13 minutes ago [-]
The answer to all your questions is that the stock market has been in a mode of price discovery for memes themselves since 2020.
Elon is the meme king.
imperialdrive 14 minutes ago [-]
If you build it, they will come.
killjoywashere 45 minutes ago [-]
Elon making outrageous projections? Noooo.....
d_silin 1 hours ago [-]
SpaceX already blown through a number of "... but this cannot be!" forecasts. Would not discount them easily.
a_shovel 49 minutes ago [-]
Skeptics said SpaceX would fail, but it succeeded. Therefore, skepticism in general is wrong and SpaceX will have an annual revenue of $11 quadrillion by 2030.
kilroy123 48 minutes ago [-]
I was thinking about this lately as well. If you break down their plan of launching a LOT of solar panels into space and strapping a GPU cluster to it. It's not _that_ crazy now.
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.
stephc_int13 17 minutes ago [-]
Not the same solar panels. As with most equipment, the constraints are very different in space/orbit, and the suppliers are not the same.
MPSimmons 1 hours ago [-]
SpaceX's entire history is full of, "there's no way they'll ever do X", followed by them doing it.
They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.
cycomanic 16 minutes ago [-]
Like what? Seriously, nobody thought shouting rockets into space was impossible. Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible. Sure they brought down prices, again nobody thought it impossible. The question is actually is it desirable. Rocket launches are pretty much the worst one can do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but somehow all technerds are falling all over themselves how great it is.
damnitbuilds 10 minutes ago [-]
"Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible."
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.’"
“Here at SpaceX we specialize in making the impossible merely late.”
-Elon
SecretDreams 30 minutes ago [-]
Just this morning, someone told me SpaceX valuation proponents couldn't possibly be more obtuse; yet, this thread has blown through those expectations.
22 minutes ago [-]
sleepyguy 55 minutes ago [-]
The US consumer cellular subscription service is around 185 billion a year and if you add business/enterprise it is around 225 billion a year. If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream. Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream. Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity.
If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....
samtp 27 minutes ago [-]
> Setting up data centers in orbit
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, 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
vel0city 27 minutes ago [-]
> If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream
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?
DenverR 1 hours ago [-]
The actual takeaway question is "is Elon Musk on a frontier of his own — or is the market extrapolating one proven outlier onto an unproven one?"
The HN title editorializes its own answer to the author's question.
devindotcom 1 hours ago [-]
it's a rhetorical question, not a real one. the author's inclination is clear as day.
DenverR 1 hours ago [-]
it's written to provoke thought and reflection.
the title does the reflection on behalf of the reader which is a disservice.
Jblx2 1 hours ago [-]
A grammar corrected title might be better as:
"Why SpaceX's 2040 Revenue Forecast of $4.3T is highly unlikely"
sometimelurker 1 hours ago [-]
thx
adding a mode on this that prevents animations would be nice addition tho
bigyabai 1 hours ago [-]
> AN ESSAY IN SCROLLS
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.
danielovichdk 1 hours ago [-]
I think the US is in such a fucked up place economically, that the stock market is so overheated and will cause grave inflation, but it's the only lever left to pull for the government, that it will cause havoc within the next 10 years.
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
scottyah 38 minutes ago [-]
I mean, the entire predicted value that the company will be worth is like 6mo of the US budget (>$7 Trillion per year). I don't think that's all that much, even if they accomplish half of what they're all trying to do.
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.
samtp 24 minutes ago [-]
You don't think one company being worth half a year of the biggest country in the world's budget is all that much?
Hard to know how to where to go from there because I find that quite insane.
wnmurphy 48 minutes ago [-]
Another factor I don't see mentioned: every Trump policy is inflationary. Deporting the labor base, deterring legal immigration, applying tariffs that were basically derived by taking the trade deficit with a country and dividing by 2, and now locking up 20% of the global oil market by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.
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.
m3kw9 1 hours ago [-]
I know this sounds "bad" but early in Tesla's forcasts, I've seen many "highly unlikely" articles, but Tesla ended up blowing past expectations. This one is tough too, but I hate just dismiss it as unlikely especially with Elon at the helm
stetrain 1 hours ago [-]
Tesla's own expectation six years ago was that they would be selling 20 million cars annually by 2030:
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.
TheOtherHobbes 1 hours ago [-]
Tesla spent almost years scraping by, almost went bankrupt in 2018, had three years of "exceeds expectation" from 2020 to 2023 and is now being murdered by competitors.
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.
wnmurphy 51 minutes ago [-]
> FSD is up to v14 and there is no sense in which it's "Full", or is likely to be "Full" any time soon.
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."
veqz 29 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I hear lots of people saying Tesla's "FSD" product can drive by itself already.
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.
wnmurphy 24 minutes ago [-]
> Until Tesla (or someone else) actually takes responsibility while the car drives itself
Were you aware they're already doing exactly this in Austin and Dallas?
vel0city 12 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, there's ~40 of them in Dallas, and they're highly geofenced.
Seems pretty small for a platform they're so confident about.
vel0city 14 minutes ago [-]
Its so good that's why they've got tons of robotaxis all over the place.
Oh, they only have a tiny fleet in a few cities which are still mostly monitored? Strange.
scottyah 32 minutes ago [-]
> murdered by competitors
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.
vel0city 15 minutes ago [-]
> The Tesla Model Y maintained its title as the world's best-selling vehicle in 2025 across all powertrains
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.
criddell 40 minutes ago [-]
Do you think full self-driving (level 5) is near? Driving a car is something we teach children to do. Surely FSD has to be getting close, no?
Is this something Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any of the other big AI investors are close to solving?
golem14 19 minutes ago [-]
Not a fanboy, but the latest generation Tesla self driving is really quite good. I still don't understand why they still aren't adding lidars now since prices have come down a lot.
itsgonnabebad 1 hours ago [-]
Blown past?
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.
throwawayqqq11 36 minutes ago [-]
Elon is a true grand master to blow past shifted goal posts. If people continue to fall for it, he might have success, however you define it.
scottyah 29 minutes ago [-]
It was only a few years ago people were saying Tesla was going to fail spectacularly, that nobody would drive an EV, that no new auto manufacturer could start in USA, that they would blow up into flames at rates way higher than ICE cars, that the CT would never be made, that they'd have to buy their batteries from suppliers that would just crank the prices up.
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.
ActionHank 1 hours ago [-]
lol, Elon is that you?
JumpinJack_Cash 1 hours ago [-]
Those things were highly unlikely because they accounted for rationality from the consumer's end as well as the political's end and of course Fed and regulators
All 3 went out of the window sometimes around 2015 or so.
flowerlad 40 minutes ago [-]
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timedude 56 minutes ago [-]
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ck2 1 hours ago [-]
I'm still struggling with the idea that 4,400 millionaires are going to be created overnight
(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
supertroop 1 hours ago [-]
College roommate worked for nvidia and cashed out last year and retired in his early 50s. Tens of millions in cash. After tax too. Am I jealous? Hell yes.
scottyah 36 minutes ago [-]
I think most still believe in the mission, especially the ones with that many shares. I get selling enough to buy a house and add some diversity to your portfolio, but you really have to have a dismal outlook to sell all your shares, or even half.
criddell 1 hours ago [-]
I take it you are going to be shorting the stock?
itsgonnabebad 1 hours ago [-]
You realize there will be people on the other end wanting and/or being forced to buy buy buy right? They aren't selling into a vacuum.
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.
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.
You're right to push back on that. Let me get the details instead of hand waving.
Also, calling most of humanity "stupid" is pretty stupid.
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.
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
lol
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."
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.)
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...
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.
Pretty sure some other principled people stayed behind and are using the field manual[1].
[1] https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184
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.
Once you learn how to spot their misaligned panels it becomes impossible not to
According to their brief, most of the revenue is going to come from AI!
The rockets are apparently just "minor" now.
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.
Sometimes there are clever ways to hack the system and the regulators can react and blame poor hindsight, that's not the case here.
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.
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.
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
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, 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
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Were you aware they're already doing exactly this in Austin and Dallas?
Seems pretty small for a platform they're so confident about.
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
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.