Pretty much what I’ve been saying for years. Tesla is not “just” a car company. SpaceX is not “just” a rocket company.
See also my post about fund manager Ron Baron on the SpaceX IPO. According to Ron SpaceX, with or without Tesla, will be the world’s largest and most profitable company. In ten years. Or so. It’s the one to buy for yourself if you’re young. For your kids and grandkids if you’re like Ron or me…
Brivael Le Pogam, translated from the French:
Ten years ago, I was listening to podcasts from a guy who wasn't half bad analyzing Tesla's growth.
His conclusion came up every time: it's insane, it doesn't hold up, you're paying fifty years of profits in advance for a car manufacturer.
His mistake wasn't in the numbers. It was in the word. He was analyzing "a car manufacturer." Tesla has never been a car manufacturer.
Today they're releasing Optimus, and the same kind of analyst will surely explain to you that it's absurd to price a humanoid robot manufacturer at that level.
We're replaying exactly the same movie with SpaceX.
The chart that's circulating right now stacks up the entire aerospace industry (GE Aerospace, RTX, Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed, Northrop, Honeywell, Safran, Rolls-Royce) to barely reach the level of a single valuation, that of SpaceX, $1,750 billion. And everyone screams bubble.
Some analysts value it at half that, with jabs like "67 times revenue" and "it would need to grow 600 times in ten years."
It's exactly the same methodological error as with Tesla. We take the current state of space, align the multiples of the present, and project onto it. We never price what's going to be built on top.
You don't price infrastructure based on its present. You price it based on the entire economies it unlocks, that no one can see when it arrives.
The railroad didn't just transport people; it gave birth to cities. The container didn't just move crates; it created globalization and trillions of dollars in value that not a single 1956 analyst had managed to plug into his model. The internet didn't just connect computers.
Access to orbit at near-zero cost is that level of disruption. And behind it, there's everything that no analyst spends a single second putting into his spreadsheet:
- Asteroid mining and lunar resource exploitation.
- Orbital data centers, cooled for free by the void and powered by constant solar energy.
- Data centers on the Moon.
- Orbital and lunar hotels.
- Amusement parks on the Moon.
- Mass space tourism.
- Trips to Mars.
- Preparation for the terraforming of Mars.
And above all, the dozens of industries that don't exist yet and whose names we don't even know, exactly like no one knew the name "e-commerce logistics" in 1960.
That's what's not in the price.
That's what no one dares to price.
With every civilizational leap, the same profiles roll out the same rule, measure the present, and declare the future too expensive.
Every time they get it wrong, in the same direction, for the same reason.
Stop repeating the mistakes of the past.
