The SpaceX IPO filing is starting to look like another Cybertruck moment.
It initially seemed like one of the most exciting public offerings in years — right up there with OpenAI and Anthropic as the kind of company that actually makes people excited about markets again. Then the numbers came out. Elon controls roughly 85% of the company, there's no credible path to profitability, and the filing reads less like a financial document than a mood board — glossy rocket photos alongside speculative projections about orbital data centers, space manufacturing, and comet mining. That's not a business plan. That's a pitch deck for people who don't read pitch decks.
Starlink is the one genuinely impressive piece of this. It's a real product with real impact — its role in helping Ukraine resist Russia's invasion is arguably one of the more significant technological stories of the decade. But the economics are punishing. The satellites require constant replacement, launch costs are enormous, and the capital expenditure never seems to stop. When you put that together with the timing of this filing, it's hard to avoid the obvious read: private funding is drying up and the burn rate has become unsustainable.
Musk has also quietly consolidated his entire empire under the SpaceX umbrella — cars, rockets, robotics, AI — so investors are essentially buying a bundle with a "future of humanity" bow on it. The Elon faithful will love it. But retail investors chasing the narrative tend to be the ones holding the bag when the narrative stops being enough.
I'd expect OpenAI to rush its own filing soon, for similar reasons: better to go public before anyone looks too hard at the numbers. Of the major AI players, Anthropic still looks like the strongest long-term bet to me — which is part of why I went long on Amazon early, given how central their investment in Anthropic has become to their AI strategy.