SpaceX lost $4.3 billion in the first three months of the year alone. Revenue was $4.7 billion and growing, but it was far lower than that of tech giants like Meta, which brought in $56.3 billion in the same period and has a stock market valuation of $1.4 trillion.

If this was only impacting folks who choose to invest in SpaceX that would be one thing. But they are forcing SpaceX down the throats of anyone who has a 401(k) and down the throats of anyone who has index funds such as QQQ, and Nasdaq suspended their normal rules for including SpaceX.

Goldman Sachs--they are leading the IPO process--told a potential investor that it expected SpaceX’s total revenue to reach $474 billion in 2030, up from $18.7 billion last year. So 25x in just 4 years. Morgan Stanley, which is also working on the IPO, said in an analysis shared with investors that it anticipated SpaceX’s revenue would hit $3.4 trillion by 2040.

I hope Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are sued out of existence for perpetuating this fraud.

With SpaceX using 23 banks for its capital raise, independent research about the record-breaking float has been very hard to come by. That alone is our reason to raise awareness of a couple of notes from the team at Morningstar.

Their headline findings are:

The stock’s probably worth $63 per share, a 53 per cent discount to the $135 issue price.

SpaceX probably has an addressable market of about $129bn, rather than the $1.6tn claimed in its S-1 filing.

In a (metaphorical) moonshot scenario, where SpaceX pioneers orbital data centres and captures 20 per cent of AI computing capacity by 2040, the company would be worth $1.97tn, or $154 per share.

Morningstar assigns only a 7 per cent per cent chance of the moonshot scenario happening.

For Starlink, Morningstar estimates the global market to be worth about $129bn, which is rather less SpaceX’s estimate of $1.6tn. “[T]echnical constraints and unit economics limit the business primarily to lower-density markets,” it says.

Space cadets and attached bankers, do please tell us in the comments what Morningstar gets wrong."