This is designed to create involuntary bag holders. The people who stay away from this IPO are betting that, while it may open at the target price, that can't last because there's no path to actual GAAP profitability. They are betting that this is an EBITDA fairytale of satellites with a short lifespan as valuable assets. But putting the company into indices right away holds all the passive investors hostage to this rug pull.

The kindest thing we can say about SpaceX is that Falcon 9 is the best run space launch operation ever. But is it profitable? Are those five-year lifespan satellites really assets? Do they generate enough cash flow to be replaced or was that all funded by capital raises along the way? And now Elon has stapled his third rate AI and zombie social network to the rockets.

Because of the way it's structured with a tiny float compared to the valuation, I wouldn't bet against the IPO at the target price. The IPO will raise enough money to keep things running for another year. But it's not a big raise especially relative to the burn rate.

All those ketamine enthusiasts are going to have to admit that it does nothing for self-awareness.

It's a failure of hiring, planning, and management. It's an off the books opportunity cost. It's an off the books cost of hiring a replacement. And if over hiring was done willfully, then yes it's straight up unethical.

I'm glad I can still count on HN to come across the correct use of a lesser known definition of a word.

This is an exercise in painting the bull's-eye around the arrow. What were we going to see this year is that Musk is capable of destroying the car company that he, against all odds, was able to scale up into a real new competitor. That's a transition that very very few have ever succeeded in making.

We may even see that his wrong size rocket is the cybertruck of space.

I was about to try to make this point: there have always been projects that attract more potential contributors than there are competent contributors.

And there have always been techniques for identifying quality contributions from new contributors.

Trump has done them a favor by creating a generation of Iranian patriots who put their anti-fundamentalism at a lower priority than their disgust at the US and Israel.

What's fascinating in the context of HN is that Trump is partly a product of the industry luminaries we talk about and occasionally see contributions from on this forum. They would get off too lightly if we write it down to cynical opportunism. Some of them are clearly taken in by pseudo intellectuals like Moldbug, crank philosophies like Accellerationism, and long-debunked pseudoscience like eugenics.

The tech industry needs to get better at identifying these pathologies early enough, and acting to prevent damage.

A few years from now SpaceX will be studied as a business school case of how EBITDA needs a plausible path to GAAP profitability in order to matter.