The most alarming parts of Elon Musk’s SpaceX filing, ranked
SpaceX filing reveals Elon’s business plan remains “all of civilization, plus ads”
Elon Musk’s newly public SpaceX filing reads less like a sober disclosure document and more like a hobbyist megalomaniac’s manifesto. Beneath the rockets are ambitions to swallow advertising, home internet, mobile connectivity, AI subscriptions, creator media, and eventually, if all goes well, the Moon and Mars. Investors are being asked to overlook the fact that one of the empire’s flagship social platforms is still a crater compared to its pre-Musk self, and that the AI business is well known for creating CSAM.
The venture, controlled by Musk, has officially filed its paperwork to go public (called a form S-1), and the document underscores those immodest ambitions, which include statements like “we believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (’TAM’) in human history,” and longer-term goals of “passenger and cargo transport to the Moon and Mars” and “asteroid mining,” both of which will presumably rely on the company’s well-known prowess in designing and building rockets.
But of more relevance to the entertainment industry is a goal of siphoning away ad dollars and subscription commitments, and a very real threat to owners of telecom players like Comcast and AT&T, where SpaceX’s Starlink internet ambitions are still nascent but growing fast.
SpaceX’s TAM includes the $600 billion advertising market, betting that it can steal commitments from the likes of Disney and Meta. And it includes the $760 billion consumer subscriptions market, taking share from Netflix and ChatGPT. The company sees a $1.6 trillion opportunity in connectivity, split across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband (where it is actively targeting the likes of Comcast and Charter) and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile (ditto for Verizon and T-Mobile).
Among the more confidence-inspiring details: X’s advertising business remains less than half of what Twitter generated before Musk acquired it, Grok offers products with names like “Unhinged” and “Spicy” while explicitly warning of deepfakes, harassment, and nonconsensual imagery, and the company’s stated total addressable market appears to be less a business category than all human economic activity not yet personally owned and operated by Elon Musk.
Some IPO filings reassure investors with discipline and focus. This one appears to say, “We are coming to monetize it all.”
It's insane. The entry for 'Enterprise Applications' is about 80% of the total valuation is essentially stuff that doesn't exist yet. It's $22.7 trillion. Which is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Germany... oh - *and* Japan... *and* the UK... not forgetting France... *and* Italy... *and* Canada.
It's about 1/4 of the entire global GDP. This valuation assumes we will all be spending about one quarter of all we earn on a giant CSAM machine.