From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

The company heading for a gigantic stock market float is Elon Musk Inc, including his AI business and Starlink. Two decades ago, it so nearly
went very wrong


Elon Musk, dressed in a black suit and black tie, shifted in his seat,
staring into the middle distance of a courtroom in Oakland, California,
last month as he pondered the future of the human race rCo and the role
that one of his companies, SpaceX, has in securing it.

rCLItrCOs life insurance for life as we know it,rCY he explained flatly. rCLThe
goal of SpaceX is to make life inter-planetary, to extend life beyond
Earth and ensure the long-term survival of life and consciousness as we
know it.rCY

It was the beginning of MuskrCOs testimony last month in his blockbuster
case against Sam Altman, whom he has accused of rCLstealingrCY OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (Musk was a co-founder and early funder.)

As the trial opened, the 54-year-old South AfricanrCOs lawyers aimed to impress upon the jury the extraordinary nature of their client, framing
him as an unrivalled titan of industry.

And what better way to do so than let him rhapsodise about the company
that makes spaceships, which he started 24 years ago with the cash from
his previous business, PayPal. No one, Musk included, thought it would succeed. rCLI generally think my companies are going to fail until proven otherwise,rCY he explained. rCLAnyone who was good wouldnrCOt join us, because I was just an internet guy. It did seem improbable, frankly.rCY

Of course, SpaceX did succeed. And now Musk is pushing ahead with a
gigantic stock market float next month in New York that will, very
likely, be the largest in history, valuing SpaceX at up to $2 trillion
(-u1.5 trillion). The company is expected to file paperwork for its
initial public offering (IPO) next week, with the float due on June 12,
under the ticker rCLSPCXrCY.

The mega deal will mark the culmination of the science-fiction childhood dreams of its founder. SpaceX is perhaps the most unusual collection of
assets ever assembled under one roof and offered up to the public. It
is, in effect, Elon Musk Inc.

SpaceX, based at Starbase, on the Gulf coast in Texas, employs more than 17,000 people and is the primary transport service taking astronauts to
and from the International Space Station. It controls 80 per cent of the launch market and fires a rocket into the heavens every other day.

The company also operates Starlink, the fast-growing provider of
high-speed internet beaming down to Earth from the largest collection of satellites in history. And because Musk never appears content to adhere
to convention, in February he merged SpaceX with xAI, which includes the social media platform X and the xAI artificial intelligence lab, and is
also an operator of vast data centres with names such as Colossus.

Last month, Musk added one more piece to this strange jigsaw: he struck
a deal with the AI coding start-up Cursor that gives SpaceX the option
to acquire the San Francisco company for $60 billion later this year.

The investor roadshow for the companyrCOs listing rCo the series of pitches designed to convince money managers to buy up to $75 billion worth of
the new SpaceX stock rCo is set to kick off June 8. What will they be
buying? SpaceX has not filed papers publicly yet, but leaked numbers
have revealed a deeply lossmaking jumble of what appear, for now, to be tangentially related businesses.

The company last year lost $5 billion on $18.5 billion in sales. This
was mostly due to MuskrCOs vast spending on new data centres to power xAI. Starlink is the cash cow rCo accounting for roughly two thirds of the grouprCOs sales rCo and it is growing fast; customers have tripled to more than ten million people over the past two years as SpaceX, by the week,
lofts more satellites into orbit to increase coverage areas and speeds.

Yet Musk has tied the financial equivalent of an anvil to his
high-flying space venture by appending his terrestrial businesses; the
social media and AI operations are losing billions. Which makes the
purported $2 trillion valuation a head scratcher. Investors will be
asked, in effect, to discard any meaningful financial metric. Instead,
Musk will try to entrance them, as is his wont, with his uniquely
fantastical vision of the future.

AI, he has predicted, will make work rCLoptional, like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from the storerCY. To power this future,
he will construct vast, solar-power data centres in space that will
orbit the globe at 22,000 miles an hour. And he will, of course,
colonise Mars as a rCLback-up planrCY in case everything goes terribly wrong on Earth due to, say, climate change or rogue AI.

If he does all of that, Musk will become an even richer man. Leaked
documents earlier this year indicated that he would be awarded millions
of super-voting restricted shares if the company hits a market value of
$7.5 trillion and establishes a rCipermanent human colony on Mars with at least one million people.

Of course, investors could get very, very rich, too rCo if the float goes
to plan. Aswath Damodaran, an expert in company valuation at New York UniversityrCOs Stern School of Business, recently estimated SpaceXrCOs value rCo based on the limited public information rCo at $1.2 trillion. But he predicted that Wall Street analysts would employ rCLpricing gymnastics
with forward multiples, hand-picked peer groups and fairy tales to
justify their [bullish] positionsrCY.

He added: rCLLove him or hate him, Musk is definitely not boring, and his capacity to spin business narratives that seem outlandish at first
hearing but become conventional wisdom later clearly adds to the allure
of SpaceX.rCY

Investors in London-listed companies will also share in the spoils.
Investment trusts Sottish Mortgage, the Schiehallion Fund, Baillie
Gifford US Growth and Edinburgh Worldwide have holdings in SpaceX.

Most extraordinary of all is how close the company came to, quite
literally, going up in smoke.

It was 2008 and SpaceX was about to run out of money. Musk had made a
boatload of cash six years before from the sale of PayPal to eBay, and
he put most of it, $100 million, into an insane idea: a start-up rocket company. Governments built rockets, private firms did not rCo and
certainly not companies run by someone with zero experience in space
flight. But Musk had long been obsessed with colonising Mars.

So, in 2002 he founded SpaceX to design, from scratch, a reusable rocket
that could theoretically be orders of magnitude cheaper than other
rocket systems in use at the time. It did not go well: SpaceXrCOs first
three rockets blew up. By 2008, it was a small company with nothing but
very public, spectacular failures and a rapidly dwindling bank account.

But Musk had one final throw of the dice: a fourth launch. On September
28, 2008, his Falcon 1 rocket successfully reached orbit from Omelek
Island in the Pacific. Three months later, the Nasa space agency awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to fly cargo to the International Space Station. SpaceX was saved. And just as Tesla kick-started the electric
vehicle industry, SpaceX has done the same for the space industry.

SpaceX technology has advanced to perform the most complex manoeuvres
In the old days, if you wanted to get kit into orbit, you had to book
space on the Space Shuttle or a Russian state rocket. SpaceX has
collapsed launch costs 20-fold, allowing an array of start-ups to gain a toehold in space rCo from firms developing zero-gravity manufacturing equipment to asteroid miners and imaging satellites.

Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley bank recently published a list of 60
companies set to benefit from the space boom. rCLA combination of
scientific advancements, geopolitics and economics has rekindled
investor attention on the space theme to the highest levels we have seen
since launching the Morgan Stanley space team nearly a decade ago,rCY he said.

Before the lawsuit, Sam Altman spoke to Walter Isaacson for a 2023
biography of Musk. He told the author: rCLElon desperately wants the world
to be saved rCo but only if he can be the one to save it.rCY SpaceX is the manifestation of that saviour complex. And as of next month, anyone can
have a piece.

It might be a steal. Or perhaps a disaster. But as Damodaran at the
Stern School of Business said, it certainly wonrCOt be boring.


Danny Fortson
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On 5/16/26 8:48 AM, Julian wrote:

The company heading for a gigantic stock market float is Elon Musk Inc, including his AI business and Starlink. Two decades ago, it so nearly
went very wrong

Elon Musk, dressed in a black suit and black tie, shifted in his seat, staring into the middle distance of a courtroom in Oakland, California,
last month as he pondered the future of the human race rCo and the role
that one of his companies, SpaceX, has in securing it.

rCLItrCOs life insurance for life as we know it,rCY he explained flatly. rCLThe
goal of SpaceX is to make life inter-planetary, to extend life beyond
Earth and ensure the long-term survival of life and consciousness as we
know it.rCY

It was the beginning of MuskrCOs testimony last month in his blockbuster case against Sam Altman, whom he has accused of rCLstealingrCY OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (Musk was a co-founder and early funder.)

As the trial opened, the 54-year-old South AfricanrCOs lawyers aimed to impress upon the jury the extraordinary nature of their client, framing
him as an unrivalled titan of industry.

And what better way to do so than let him rhapsodise about the company
that makes spaceships, which he started 24 years ago with the cash from
his previous business, PayPal. No one, Musk included, thought it would succeed. rCLI generally think my companies are going to fail until proven otherwise,rCY he explained. rCLAnyone who was good wouldnrCOt join us, because
I was just an internet guy. It did seem improbable, frankly.rCY

Of course, SpaceX did succeed. And now Musk is pushing ahead with a
gigantic stock market float next month in New York that will, very
likely, be the largest in history, valuing SpaceX at up to $2 trillion (-u1.5 trillion). The company is expected to file paperwork for its
initial public offering (IPO) next week, with the float due on June 12, under the ticker rCLSPCXrCY.

The mega deal will mark the culmination of the science-fiction childhood dreams of its founder. SpaceX is perhaps the most unusual collection of assets ever assembled under one roof and offered up to the public. It
is, in effect, Elon Musk Inc.

SpaceX, based at Starbase, on the Gulf coast in Texas, employs more than 17,000 people and is the primary transport service taking astronauts to
and from the International Space Station. It controls 80 per cent of the launch market and fires a rocket into the heavens every other day.

The company also operates Starlink, the fast-growing provider of high-
speed internet beaming down to Earth from the largest collection of satellites in history. And because Musk never appears content to adhere
to convention, in February he merged SpaceX with xAI, which includes the social media platform X and the xAI artificial intelligence lab, and is
also an operator of vast data centres with names such as Colossus.

Last month, Musk added one more piece to this strange jigsaw: he struck
a deal with the AI coding start-up Cursor that gives SpaceX the option
to acquire the San Francisco company for $60 billion later this year.

The investor roadshow for the companyrCOs listing rCo the series of pitches designed to convince money managers to buy up to $75 billion worth of
the new SpaceX stock rCo is set to kick off June 8. What will they be buying? SpaceX has not filed papers publicly yet, but leaked numbers
have revealed a deeply lossmaking jumble of what appear, for now, to be tangentially related businesses.

The company last year lost $5 billion on $18.5 billion in sales. This
was mostly due to MuskrCOs vast spending on new data centres to power xAI. Starlink is the cash cow rCo accounting for roughly two thirds of the grouprCOs sales rCo and it is growing fast; customers have tripled to more than ten million people over the past two years as SpaceX, by the week, lofts more satellites into orbit to increase coverage areas and speeds.

Yet Musk has tied the financial equivalent of an anvil to his high-
flying space venture by appending his terrestrial businesses; the social media and AI operations are losing billions. Which makes the purported
$2 trillion valuation a head scratcher. Investors will be asked, in
effect, to discard any meaningful financial metric. Instead, Musk will
try to entrance them, as is his wont, with his uniquely fantastical
vision of the future.

AI, he has predicted, will make work rCLoptional, like growing your own vegetables instead of buying them from the storerCY. To power this future, he will construct vast, solar-power data centres in space that will
orbit the globe at 22,000 miles an hour. And he will, of course,
colonise Mars as a rCLback-up planrCY in case everything goes terribly wrong on Earth due to, say, climate change or rogue AI.

If he does all of that, Musk will become an even richer man. Leaked documents earlier this year indicated that he would be awarded millions
of super-voting restricted shares if the company hits a market value of
$7.5 trillion and establishes a rCipermanent human colony on Mars with at least one million people.

Of course, investors could get very, very rich, too rCo if the float goes
to plan. Aswath Damodaran, an expert in company valuation at New York UniversityrCOs Stern School of Business, recently estimated SpaceXrCOs value rCo based on the limited public information rCo at $1.2 trillion. But he predicted that Wall Street analysts would employ rCLpricing gymnastics
with forward multiples, hand-picked peer groups and fairy tales to
justify their [bullish] positionsrCY.

He added: rCLLove him or hate him, Musk is definitely not boring, and his capacity to spin business narratives that seem outlandish at first
hearing but become conventional wisdom later clearly adds to the allure
of SpaceX.rCY

Investors in London-listed companies will also share in the spoils. Investment trusts Sottish Mortgage, the Schiehallion Fund, Baillie
Gifford US Growth and Edinburgh Worldwide have holdings in SpaceX.

Most extraordinary of all is how close the company came to, quite
literally, going up in smoke.

It was 2008 and SpaceX was about to run out of money. Musk had made a boatload of cash six years before from the sale of PayPal to eBay, and
he put most of it, $100 million, into an insane idea: a start-up rocket company. Governments built rockets, private firms did not rCo and
certainly not companies run by someone with zero experience in space
flight. But Musk had long been obsessed with colonising Mars.

So, in 2002 he founded SpaceX to design, from scratch, a reusable rocket that could theoretically be orders of magnitude cheaper than other
rocket systems in use at the time. It did not go well: SpaceXrCOs first three rockets blew up. By 2008, it was a small company with nothing but
very public, spectacular failures and a rapidly dwindling bank account.

But Musk had one final throw of the dice: a fourth launch. On September
28, 2008, his Falcon 1 rocket successfully reached orbit from Omelek
Island in the Pacific. Three months later, the Nasa space agency awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to fly cargo to the International Space

talk about that sweet sweet govt gibs

Station. SpaceX was saved. And just as Tesla kick-started the electric vehicle industry, SpaceX has done the same for the space industry.

SpaceX technology has advanced to perform the most complex manoeuvres
In the old days, if you wanted to get kit into orbit, you had to book
space on the Space Shuttle or a Russian state rocket. SpaceX has
collapsed launch costs 20-fold, allowing an array of start-ups to gain a toehold in space rCo from firms developing zero-gravity manufacturing equipment to asteroid miners and imaging satellites.

Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley bank recently published a list of 60
companies set to benefit from the space boom. rCLA combination of
scientific advancements, geopolitics and economics has rekindled
investor attention on the space theme to the highest levels we have seen since launching the Morgan Stanley space team nearly a decade ago,rCY he said.

Before the lawsuit, Sam Altman spoke to Walter Isaacson for a 2023
biography of Musk. He told the author: rCLElon desperately wants the world to be saved rCo but only if he can be the one to save it.rCY SpaceX is the manifestation of that saviour complex. And as of next month, anyone can
have a piece.

also mars is significantly *more* hostile to life than the nuclear
winter after a holocaust, or the worse possible mass extinction event,
so i have no idea why he think that has anything to do with preserving
the human species

It might be a steal. Or perhaps a disaster. But as Damodaran at the
Stern School of Business said, it certainly wonrCOt be boring.

Danny Fortson

--
hi, i'm nick!
let's end war EfOa

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

On 5/17/2026 4:10 AM, dart200 wrote:

also mars is significantly *more* hostile to life than the nuclear
winter after a holocaust, or the worse possible mass extinction event,
so i have no idea why he think that has anything to do with preserving
the human species

Cosmic impacts, my dude. It's about surviving comets and asteroids. The
worst possible mass extinction event might destroy all the life on the
planet. We wouldn't be here to rebuild.

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2