Google (now under parent company Alphabet) invested roughly $900 million as the majority of a ~$1 billion funding round alongside Fidelity Investments. This gave Google an initial equity stake of about 7–7.5% in SpaceX at a valuation of roughly $10–12 billion.

From Claude via stockanalysis.com: META — institutions 67.51%, insiders 13.49%, float 2.19B of 2.54B shares outstanding. That leaves roughly 19% as retail/other.

SPCX — institutions 5.95%, insiders 46.47%, float only 638.65M of 13.17B shares. Residual is ~47.6%, but that is not retail.

This is laughable. Many shareholders don’t even know they own stock in these companies.

And once you've left the company and roll those 401ks over into IRAs, you can put them at whatever financial institution you want, many of which have more or less unlimited flexibility (within legality) with regard to what you can invest in.

Now, I know many employees just sort of adopt an "autopilot" attitude and don't pay much attention to their retirement account investments, but that's on them for ignoring this stuff. (The lack of general financial literacy, in the US at least, continues to disappoint me.)

So: yes, there are some people who don't have much of a say in how their retirement fund is invested, but my feeling is that those people are a small minority. I do think a large number (perhaps even a majority) of people do have the ability to direct their retirement investments, but either don't know they can do it, or can't be bothered. Again, though, that's on them for not educating themselves and playing a more active role in their financial future.

Many people wouldn't support SpaceX and Tesla if they knew more about Musk. Conversely, some other people who don't know much about him might want to support his companies.

Your standard SPY or VTI investor doesn't know jack diddly squat about shareholder rights, nor do they ever plan to invoke them.

You can always decide to pick an ETF that doesn't invest in the companies you don't like, or invest in individual stocks if you have the time and stomach for it.

Oh, don't worry. I already know the answer. I'm asking if YOU can tell me the answer.

There were disputes around SpaceX secondary market/special purpose vehicle shares before the listing, but they were all settled out of court, AFAIK.

One exception is GOOG / GOOGL which both trade actively, and there's not much difference in price.

The mechanism for a price divergence could be accumulation of the 10x shares to seize control, but even if you could buy the entire float, it wouldn't be enough to take control, so that mechanism never happens.

By voting rights, they have 10x (founder stock), 1x (trading as GOOGL), and 0x (trading as GOOG). The class with 10x voting rights does not trade publicly. The class with 1x voting rights does not have enough voting power to control the direction of the company so there is no real difference in perceived value between GOOG and GOOGL.

Employee stock awards are IIRC all in restricted shares of GOOG (0x voting rights) so they don't dilute the power of the founders.

Interestingly, the 10x shares held by Brin and Page constitute only 11% of the economic value of Alphabet, but 51% of the voting control.

And the 10x shares automatically convert to 1x shares upon transfer or inheritance, so if the founders cash out or die, the 10x supervoting power disappears.

it should be, but the market might be a bit irrational.

he might have a large miss with the metaverse, & maybe current a.i effort. but in terms of being ruthless with competition & acquiring competition he did his job well as CEO.

musky on the other hand - overpromising and underdelivering.

Sure, I'm cherrypicking the success stories but I don't think it's the only signal people should use.

By traditional business metrics it looks toxic but compared to a typical tech unicorn it's not really outstanding.

Considering it's a tech unicorn with strategic and financial leverage like no other (their own global Internet infrastructure, access to arbitrary billions in capital, ability to build the biggest chip fab in the world), it's certainly fair to call it a gamble, but to call it failing is a stretch imo.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terafab

[2] https://terafab.ai/

(man, I wish I could get people to throw money at me for all of my outstanding projects that I buy some parts for and would be nice to do "some time")

Companies generally don't just jump into a totally new market unless they've already got some experience.

The SpaceX acquisitions of xAI and X have absolutely nothing to do with space. While I'm sure SpaceX software engineers benefit greatly from cheap access to Grok, it and X have no relevance to the core business of SpaceX. It's the same level as "huh?" if Boeing decided to buy up an AI company and social media platform. The only reason xAI and X are even part of SpaceX is because Musk fucked himself with being forced to buy Twitter and he decided to bundle them with an actually profitable company.

X can supply training data to to Xai and Grok is heavily integrated into X so there is some synergy there.

He broke through that professional firewall when he merged xAI with SpaceX and then pushed it to go public as he did. I also posit that Gwynne Shotwell is weirdly undervalued for what she's accomplished and what she's put up with, and I think that will show up some time in the future.

There was enough technical analysis to show that even Musk's cult feed can't overcome the significant financial hardships he laid on SpaceX. I personally think it was his jump the shark move. He can't really go up again after this. He no longer has any untainted assets for mega-exploits.

Gwynne is fiercely loyal to Elon. I don't expect to see significant strife between them.

Seems similar to me as when Eric Schmidt resigned from the Apple board many years back because their products started to overlap, especially mobile.

Twitter by itself is lucky to be worth $15B anymore.

The space portion of SpaceX is easily worth 10x that.

xAI is theoretically the hype machine that makes up the remainder of the value.

It's insanely profitable they did $7.2bn in EBITDA on $11.4bn in revenue in 2025.

And SpaceX has become their favorite place to put money over the last 5 years.

A huge mistake, I'm sure the relevant parties have been punished appropriately.

Whether this trend continues or not indefinitely will largely determine if incestors start looking for the door.

In defence of Mr Musk, despite his character flaws, Tesla is the only Western electric car company in the top 20, and this includes Korea and Japan. Also, SpaceX is ~90% of the world's commercial rocket launch capacity.

But this does not mean SpaceX would be correctly priced at the moment. It may be expensive, but SpaceX is going to have many years to come to reap the benefits of their hard work building the business.

Which is going not too badly for the shorts, so far. There's a reason almost 50% of the float is loaned out.

We'll see once the earnings call rolls around.

The funniest thing you can write… Can’t believe people still write “Robotaxi” after 12+ years of failed promises… wild wild stuff

Because I find your words surprising since critique is what I was raised with in the late 90s early 2000s. Offline and in the media.

At the same time your definition of criticizing is very lax, when I'm stating banal opinions and a broad observation.

If only some billionaires (trillionaires?) could strike a better balance between successful and human. Especially since most wealth is actually wealth transfer from the poor and from taxpayer coffers to the rich.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8914956

"It's quite amazing how this values SpaceX at 10bn, less than 50% of WhatsApp."

Somebody was wise a decade ago.

Since then Starlink has succeeded, reusable rockets are a reality, ISS crewed spaceflight restored to US.

I expect all that had an impact on the valuation. Personally I wouldn't invest in Elon because his stock is a wild ride but space x has achieved a lot.

Alphabet’s investment holdings (eg, spacex, anthropic..) are worth in the same order of magnitude of BRK’s (~$300B)

The track record of google’s M&A is pretty good.

Except for search and cloud, many of Google’s important products were from M&A - Maps, Docs, android, doubleclick, youtube , deep mind, etc.

So on that front, while I didn’t guess this, it does sound like a good investment.

Furthermore, while I am skeptical about the “DC in space” thing in the short term, and Musk’s timelines are, generously, something like P99.9 outcomes, it seems plausible that in 10 years it might make sense. And at that point Google will want to put their TPUs in orbit, too.

    > Data centers in space?

Everything else you said draws from some regular consumer experiences. That's not what I am talking about here.

This may be a narrative violation on HN, but the quality of Google's management is exceptional.

I don't think anybody at Google has sent that email, yet. Maybe Sergey and Sundar don't use Google products, anymore. Maybe they have a special Google just for billionaires that doesn't suck.

"The Market", at this scale, means "You find the buyer(s) yourself and work up the deal with a hundred lawyers and PR staff and hope the contract negotiation stays secret".

One consequence of booking the revenue is that they're going to have to report a loss when they sell it.

It's possible there's some tax shenanigans at play (idk): report the profit, mark it against their massive AI capex, sell later when they can book a loss. (I'm not sure if it works that way, it wouldn't for an individual, but maybe they can find a way to trigger a stepped up basis.)

Or is Alphabet greedy for holding onto the equity instead of selling it for cash? Or is throwaw12 greedy for wanting to sell something after a 100x return?

100 billion is nothing if that money can put you in better spot at technology landscape

EDIT: cleaned up my comment; removed a more inflammatory claim about corruption in the private sector.

Corruption that stands out to me would be regarding starlink, Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites, but the competitors were able to comply and offer a better service still, while starlink’s existing fleet cannot. meaning elon still would actually have to compete and make a new starlink fleet, which he is doing now. (Basically competitors dont need a base station, and future starlink wont meed a base station either, direct to device ubiquity high speed service is coming) but before that path, he then tried to get an exception from the fcc regulation he promulgated, which was extremely grimy. The fcc didn’t go along.

Its how it declines to that point at another 70% loss from $1.5 trillion that people are worried about

For what it’s worth, I get it. I have found Musk insufferable for the last decade since he attached himself to the right and got into drugs, however I think SpaceX is undervalued right now.

1. They are literally the only company on earth with a reliable partially reusable launch system. There are a few people trying, but everyone else is way behind.

2. When they eventually (hopefully) get Starship right, we will see a price drop in the cost of transportation to orbit we have never seen. When I did the numbers a few years ago, the price for space mining to be comparable to terrestrial mining was around $20-60/kg to orbit. They’d effectively be the ONLY way to access that. That’s one of a gazillion things that becomes possible with cheap access to space. UPS becomes a competitor at those prices… it’s game changing.

3. They are basically dominating the satellite internet world. Nothing compares. Starlink is amazing, especially here in Alaska, I suspect they will eventually have a phone, which will be revolutionary.

4. A gazillion government contracts, Star shield, and arguably point to point QRF shuttle (after starship). The defense implications alone mean that they are going to be around indefinitely.

I don’t know, but I think people are sleeping on this.

In a world of money, every bit you can earn, you have to earn, while I know it is immoral to sell the data for spying purposes, morality alone don't mean shit now, that I never see any capitalists and corpo dogs have any kind of morality anyway, except when massive backslash, congress hearings and boycotts, which is, ahem, Meta/Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. But given the unique position Musk used to have in Trump's government and his right leaning position he is safe to do so. At least for now, he is immune to holding congress hearing for a scandal I suppose.

And not to mention that Grok is literally trained over X/Twitter, and keep in mind Bluesky is federated and strangely, no one seems to be scraping it over ActivityPub. I believe Thread is also built on the same foundation but it's sure that Meta made good measures for antiscraping, I expected as a data oriented company.

Alas, keep in mind SpaceX merged with xAI and nonetheless don't forget their data side

All these come together with orbital data centers…

But you don´t get to to that. Would be like "Excluding my business costs, my company profits are the same as my revenue".

You can, and for tax purposes you must. The bean counters hate that you can’t deduct capex.

Google has hardware, software ecosystem, mobile ecosystem, controls browser, has access to 2B+ users, has talent to come up with ideas - perfect spot for AI

Would I bet that other humans would believe that? Nope.

The market hasn't been working on fundamentals for a long time. I have a fair amount of value stocks and a bunch of cash lying around, so I'll be ok.

I really feel for anybody trying to invest to grow right now; there's no obvious safer play.

Vanguard’s total market fund (VTSAX). Just setup a monthly purchase and forget about it. Turn wealth building into a time problem instead of a skill/luck/cash problem. (Assuming time is on your side)

SpaceX I actually bought at the IPO price because I think the company will be around in 30 years time, so as fraudulent and mispriced as it is, having a small holding over that kind of horizon I believe will be profitable. And I want to be that kind of old-timer who can chuckle at buying it at the IPO and holding through the crash and still holding when they are on Mars and beyond and SPCX is worth multiples of what it is today.

Oh, me too. The way it writes things that look like they address my question, and then links references that totally don't makes me dread Googling in a way I hadn't yet. For probably five years, I've been doing DDG first and Google when I DDG doesn't work well and usually Google doesn't either, so I already have dread for Google, but this makes it worse.

> So your short could work, but it’s not going to work for google’s involvement in an AI-bubble, it’s predicated on the entire market tanking

Is indeed a required assumption. Major return is not going to happen with this, Not losing a big chunk of my money is the goal!

> SpaceX I actually bought at the IPO price because I think the company will be around in 30 years time, so as fraudulent and mispriced as it is, having a small holding over that kind of horizon I believe will be profitable. And I want to be that kind of old-timer who can chuckle at buying it at the IPO and holding through the crash and still holding when they are on Mars and beyond and SPCX is worth multiples of what it is today.

I think that's a fine play as well. The short is more of an "This IPO price doesn't make sense; sell within a year after it settle"

[0] By net income. By operating income, still like top 5 to top 10 depending on how you interpret the numbers.

I’ve always been hesitant to short stocks because of the old adage “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” and the market has a REAL vested interest in seeing these companies not explode.

Good luck on this one, genuinely, because you may need it.

(That said, if you DO win big on this one, I think we’re all fucked, so maybe I shouldn’t be wishing you TOO much luck. =) )

Anthropic and OpenAI though will likely be dead, killed by cheap open weight LLMs and local LLMs.

Even in the last Elon Musk interview by The Economist, he admited that it's likely China will win at the end.

The gap is so close now. Opinions matter not, the Chinese will have their own GPUs, RAM and everything they need.

Giants like google and spacex are the few that can handle it because their business is not only about shipping the best models.

It will also crash the price of chips globally. These high prices are kind of artificially buoyed by the fact that China can’t obtain ASML machines. This keeps China’s vast proven ability to scale manufacturing off the playing field.

This is so clearly the Chinese century. Doesn’t mean the US, EU, etc become backwaters. England was a huge influence on the 20th century. It does mean that China will drive tech and the global economy forward.

But yes the stock could go down much further and I hope they are willing to show the losses if they can show this as gains today.

Imagine the next call being about how their 95$B went to sub 30B$..

Will that be a negative line item. I don't see the point in disclosing this stake as earnings.

But I do get that accounting was made as a tool for companies to show off.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/20/spacex-fundi...

Actually more like $14.1 and whatever value the other $80 is worth when they sell. Which is probably going to be worth well North of whatever is lost on the $14.1 B long-term... All part of the scam to inflate the value of the AI bubble

For example.

> “Will be in the BVI/St Bart’s area over the holidays. Is there a good time to visit?” Musk states on 13 December 2013.

> “any day 1st - 8th . play it by ear if you want. always space for you,” Epstein replies.

> Musk then sends several emails relaying his schedule, and the two settle on 2 January as a date for the visit. The email exchange ends with Epstein telling Musk that he would need to remain in New York and sending his regrets that they could not meet.

> “Bad news- Unfortunately , my schedule will keep me in New York . I was really looking forward to finally spending some time together with just fun as the agenda. so i am very disappointed. Hopefully we can schedule another time in the near future,” Epstein wrote.

> In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking “how many people will you be for the heli to island”.

> “Probably just Talulah and me. What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk replied, in an apparent reference to his former wife Talulah Riley.

> Musk followed up with an email on 25 December in response to another Epstein message that encouraged him to visit and offered use of his helicopter.

> “Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for,” Musk wrote.

> “Understood , I will see you on st Barth, the ratio on my island might make Talilah uncomfortable,” Epstein responded.

> “Ratio is not a problem for Talulah,” Musk said.

> On 2 January 2013, Musk sent Epstein an email suggesting that the visit wouldn’t take place saying: “Logistics won’t work this time around.”

[0] https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01762...