The Final Countdown?

Buried in the SpaceX IPO filing, under “future revenue streams,” are three business lines I can't read without laughing:

• rocket commuting;
• asteroid mining; and
• in-orbit manufacturing.

This is not in some bullish marketing pitch deck. This is in a formal SEC filing. A legal document. The kind of document which is usually so boring that people get excited about lease obligations and accounting standards.

I keep picturing the room where this was approved. I've sat in these rooms before.

Lawyers in expensive shirts. Bankers with dead eyes. Compliance people asking whether the wording creates unnecessary liability.

And then someone from investor relations asks whether “long-haul point-to-point terrestrial travel” sounds more investable than “rocket commuting.”

Apparently, it does.

This is the prospectus for what will become the largest IPO in American history. And somehow, somewhere inside the great cathedral of modern finance, everyone has agreed to pretend that mining asteroids is a normal thing to put in a revenue forecast.

I admire the confidence. But this is the moment that the world went mad. We will look back at this summer. It will be taught in history lessons.

If only we could learn those lessons now.

Rocket Commuting

Back in 2018, Gwynne Shotwell stood on a TED stage and said that within a decade, people would be taking 30-minute rocket trips from New York to Shanghai. The idea was that SpaceX would compete with long-haul airlines, offering multiple flights a day between major cities.

It sounded ridiculous then, in that particular Silicon Valley way where ridicule and genius are often confused.

After all, reusable rockets also sounded ridiculous once. Landing boosters on floating platforms sounded ridiculous. Building a private space company that could outcompete NASA sounded ridiculous.

That is the useful thing about having already done the impossible. It makes the next impossible thing harder to dismiss.

But we're now getting close to the end of that promised decade, and there is no commercial commuter rocket. There is no passenger terminal. There is no route map showing London to Tokyo in 29 minutes. There is no regulatory framework for strapping civilians into what is, in fact, a reusable ballistic missile.

There is not even the faintest sign that ordinary people want their Tuesday business trip to begin with 4Gs of acceleration. Not to mention that Musk has yet to land one of these new rockets without it exploding...

And yet the plans and the revenue are still in the prospectus: “long-haul point-to-point terrestrial travel.”

It's a beautiful phrase.

It takes something completely mad and dresses it up in the language of airport lounges and market expansion. Rocket commuting becomes “terrestrial travel.” Being fired across the planet becomes “point-to-point.” A speculative fantasy becomes a revenue stream.

That is how the game works. You don’t need the thing to exist. You need it to sound inevitable.

The Asteroid Bit

Then there's asteroid mining, which is even better.

The logic, I suppose, is simple enough. Earth has resources. Asteroids have resources. Therefore, at some point, someone will want to mine asteroids. And if someone is going to mine asteroids, why not SpaceX?

On paper, you can make almost anything sound sensible if you stretch the timeline far enough. One day there may be space-based supply chains. One day there may be permanent lunar infrastructure. One day there may be orbital factories and interplanetary logistics and mineral extraction from rocks floating millions of miles away.

Fine. Maybe. I’m not here to say none of this will ever happen.

But there is something wonderfully absurd about seeing it presented in the same document as ordinary business risks. As if investors are supposed to weigh asteroid mining alongside interest rate exposure and customer concentration.

“Revenue may be affected by launch delays, regulatory constraints, and failure to extract commercially viable metals from near-Earth objects.”

You can almost hear the lawyers sweating (except they won't be as no one is actually able to sue Musk for any of this. More of which later...)

And then we get to in-orbit manufacturing. Again, I understand the concept. Certain things may be easier or better to manufacture in microgravity. There could be materials, pharmaceuticals or components that benefit from being made off-planet.

But still.

Manufacturing is hard enough when your factory is on Earth, has gravity, toilets, roads, maintenance teams and a broken vending machine. Moving the whole thing into orbit does not exactly simplify the operating model.

Yet there it is too, calmly filed under future revenue.

Rocket commuting. Asteroid mining. In-orbit manufacturing.

A trio of phrases that sound less like a business plan and more like the running order of a 1980s Tomorrow's World show.

And Yet It Will Still Work

The most annoying thing is that none of this nonsense will stop the IPO.

Not for one second.

Of course it will happen. Of course the banks will line up. Of course the media will cover it like a moon landing. Of course investors will find a way to justify the valuation.

Oh yes. The valuation.

Since its founding, SpaceX has accumulated over $37 billion in losses. More than any company that has ever gone public in American history. The company generated $18.7 billion in revenue and lost about $9 billion. At a $1.75 trillion valuation, that's roughly 100 times revenue.

But the 23 banks whose names are plastered across the cover of the prospectus are not there because they have carefully considered the economics of asteroid extraction. They are there because this could be the biggest payday in Wall Street history, and nobody wants to be the person who sat it out because the prospectus was a bit silly.

The Success Is Structural

The "cleverest" part is not the asteroid mining. It's not the rocket commuting. It's not even the myth-making, although Musk remains one of the great myth-makers of modern capitalism.

It'ssthe structure around the IPO.

Musk has reportedly 'bribed' the NASDAQ to change its index inclusion rules so that SpaceX can be fast-tracked into the NASDAQ 100. In fact the index only won the right to the IPO because it changed its rules. That sounds like a technical detail, but it is not. It's a bribe. From the richest man of earth. And it will make almost half of American's with pension pots poorer.

The NASDAQ 100 is tracked by hundreds of billions of dollars in passive money. Index funds. Pension funds. ETFs. Money that does not sit there making thoughtful judgments about whether commuters are ready to swap business class for controlled explosions.

It just buys.

That is the point of passive money. If the stock enters the index, the funds tracking that index have to own it. They are not buying because they believe in asteroid mining. They are not buying because they have carefully modelled in-orbit manufacturing margins. They are buying because the rules tell them to buy.

So before the market has had a proper chance to digest the business, before price discovery has done its work, before anyone has really figured out what SpaceX should be worth as a public company, an enormous pool of capital is already being pushed towards it.

That changes everything.

The IPO is not simply being offered to investors. It is being wired into the machinery of modern markets. The story creates demand. The banks amplify demand. The index rules institutionalise demand. Then passive money arrives with purchase orders.

At that point, the details of the prospectus become irrelevant. Greed has done its thing. And the stupidest IPO in history is off and running.

The Nonsense Is Priced In

This is what I find so fascinating. You could probably replace asteroid mining with almost anything and the outcome wouldn't change.

Lunar petting zoo? Mars-based wedding venues? Zero-gravity leadership retreats? A premium subscription service where billionaires get to name craters after themselves?

It would not matter.

The banks would still underwrite it. The lawyers would still caveat it. The analysts would still build models around it. Passive funds would still buy it. Retail investors would still pile in because nobody wants to miss the future.

That is where we are now. We have built a system where the story matters more than the substance, provided the story is attached to the right person, the right company and the right market structure.

This is investing as mythology.

To be clear, SpaceX is not a joke. Far from it. It has done extraordinary things. Reusable rockets are real. Starlink is real. Launch dominance is real. The company has transformed the space industry in ways that would have sounded absurd twenty years ago.

That is precisely why this works.

The credible parts of the business create enough gravitational pull to drag the absurd parts along with them. Once a company has achieved something genuinely remarkable, investors become more willing to believe the next impossible thing. Then the next one. Then the one after that.

That is the Musk premium.

Tesla was never valued like a car company because it was never sold as a car company. It was energy, autonomy, software, robotics, AI, infrastructure, the future, all rolled into one. Every new promise expanded the possible valuation.

SpaceX is even better suited to this treatment because its story is literally limitless. How do you value a company that might one day dominate launch, satellite internet, defence logistics, lunar infrastructure, Mars transport, asteroid mining and global rocket travel?

You can’t.

Which is the point.

When the story is big enough, valuation becomes less a calculation and more an act of faith.

Nobody Has To Believe

The strangest thing is that most of the people involved are not stupid. The bankers know. The institutional investors know. The lawyers know. The journalists know. Plenty of retail investors know too.

Everyone can see that most of these future revenue streams are wildly speculative. Everyone understands that “point-to-point terrestrial travel” is not about to replace British Airways next Thursday. Nobody is sitting there thinking asteroid mining will be contributing to next quarter’s EBITDA.

But the machine does not require belief.

It only requires participation. Because every incentive points in the same direction.

The real story is that the contents of the prospectus don't even matter.

I Haven't Even Mentioned AI

To convince you that this thing is bonkers, I haven't even had to mention Grok, Musk's AI company. Because SpaceX is actually being marketed as an AI company.

It even says (in the prospectus) that SpaceX's total addressable market is $28.5 which is larger than the entire GDP of USA.

Maybe I should have started there. That alone is such a stupid thing to say that the rest of my arguments are moot.

93% of this future revenue is to come from Grok. A business that is placed 3rd (maybe lower) in the current market behind OpenAI and Anthropic with a measly 3.4% market share. A business that lost $2.5 bn in Q1 2026.

Would you pay 100x revenue for a business with 3.4% of the market that it believes underpins everything?!?!?

We live in a system where banks compete so desperately for fees that even the listing order becomes political. Where index rules can bend around a company because the company is too important to miss.

And where the most absurd parts of a prospectus can sit there and everyone knows they are nonsense.

That nonsense is priced in.

So I'm sitting here and laughing. But I'm looking around and asking why nobody else is?

Until next time,

Jon "The Big Short" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately

P.S.

I am writing a book based on my thoughts, opinions and writing in this newsletter. If you like these weekly essays then please register interest in my forthcoming book:
"How to Stay Human in a Noisy World."