The Cult of the Ultra-Wealthy with Ed Elson
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host, Ed Zitron.
And I'll see you next time. on to the episode. Today, I am joined by the incredible Ed Elson of Prof G Markets. Ed, how are you doing?
I'm doing very well. I'm very excited to contribute to the Zitron empire, which is growing by the minute, it seems.
Yes, it's a dangerous empire full of terrible ideas. But let's talk about a specific terrible idea. You've been going nutrageous over the SpaceX IPO, and I feel like I haven't done the listeners justice talking about how insane this company is. So please, lead us in.
Yeah, well, we could probably start with the proposed valuation, which was supposed to go public at around $2 trillion. It eventually came down to around $1.75 trillion, which was just flat out insane from the get-go because it values the company at more than 100 times sales. If the point of a company is to make money or to make more money than it spends, then this is just a very bad company. It lost $5 billion last year. It lost more than $4 billion in the first quarter of this year. And if the idea is that your revenues are going to grow faster than your expenditures, well, that's currently not the case. because their revenue grew only 15% in the first quarter and their losses grew 700%. So this is like, by all forms of standard accounting, this is like genuinely a bad business.
And you really have to kind of cross your fingers and hope that something works out in order to believe that this is a viable investment, especially at the valuation that they were pushing for. And that's basically what we learned in that IPO filing. It was basically just a giant message to tell investors, hey, just don't worry about it. Elon Musk is a genius. Just kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. And there's a lot in that filing that we can get into. a lot of ridiculous language that we could unpack. But essentially, that is the problem. It's something that I pointed out as soon as the company went public.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–13:38
2
Who are the host and guest introducing the episode and why does Ed Elson appear?
13:38–17:12
3
Why does Ed Elson call SpaceX’s IPO valuation “insane” based on sales and losses?
17:12–36:04
4
What unrealistic total addressable market and orbital AI data center claims did SpaceX make in its S-1?
36:04–1:01:59
5
How do investment banks and underwriting fees incentivize bullish analyst coverage for SpaceX?
1:01:59–1:08:44