this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026
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The valuation of the stock is based on Musk doing what he's always done, which is making seemingly impossible promises sometime in the future.
You know what he promised by 2025? A fleet of driverless Tesla taxis. xAI producing the first AGI. A human being on Mars planting a flag.
You know what the evaluation of SpaceX is based on? The promise of a Mars colony with one million human inhabitants, and space-based data centers. It's going to be decades before it's worth the IPO, if ever.
In the meantime SpaceX is in debt 20 billion, and is bleeding money. It lost $4.94 billion in 2025.
So it looks to me like a private equity project. Like Toys 'R Us or Radio Shack or Claire's. Remember those?
And Nasdaq-100 is fast-tracking SpaceX into its portfolio after 15 days. Soon, pension funds and 401(k)s are going to feature SpaceX stocks. So when it does implode, a lot of worker-class folk are going to eat the loss.
You know who I bet will not be eating the loss? Trillionaire Elon Musk.
My favorite part about data centers in space is it may actually be impossible from a physics standpoint to build the heat radiators large enough for even a small one. Even though space is cold and would seem to make sense, it is also a destructive vacuum and to radiate even a small amount of heat outside of a shielded core would take a huge array of radiators
No, it's totally possible. Not with any technology we've ever built, maybe not with any technology we can build, but physics doesn't preclude it outright.
Your point still stands though. It's a promise that's impossible to meet within the lifetime of the investors.
It’s possible, but not economical.
For basically any “space datacenter” scenario, imagine putting that same thing in a vast desert instead. You’ll find it’s easier and an order of magnitude cheaper.
Yeah, maybe not impossible, but I mean extremely unlikely. I found a thread on reddit that had examples and a spreadsheet https://www.reddit.com/r/IsaacArthur/comments/11kp7s4/how_large_of_a_heatradiator_would_a_spacecraft/
To run a data center in space you would need some kind of reactor producing around 100 MW. If rejecting 100 MW at 800 K
A= 100,000,000 / 0.85×5.670374419e−8×800
The number is the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (σ) https://physics.knox.edu/OnlineHW/zTest-PhysicalConstants.html
A≈5,065 m²
So roughly:
5,100 m² of radiating surface
That is a square about:
√(5065) ≈71 m per side
If it is a double-sided radiator panel, the physical panel area could be about half:
2,530 m² of panel, about 50 m × 50 m, assuming both sides radiate effectively.
Also temperature matters enormously so
At emissivity 0.85:
So the answer is about 5,000 m² (lol this is like "a football field" on each side) at 800 K, but balloons to absurd levels like hundreds of thousands of m² if you are trying to dump room-temperature waste heat which there would be a significant amount of. That is for a single small data center at current power needs. In the US alone data centers use 176 TWh (https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646), so there is no chance we are going to be migrating a significant portion of it into space.
800K is 526C! You can't run a datacenter at that.
80C (still very hot for datacenter hardware coolant) is 350K. And there are other challenges, like effects from being in LEO, or proximity to wherever the solar array is.
And this is just one of MANY ridiclous engineering challenges. Another great example is that GPUs, memory, and SSDs get random bit flips in orbit, and the issue gets worse with smaller lithography: https://www.itpro.com/server-storage/high-performance-computing-hpc/367323/hpes-supercomputer-helps-iss-astronauts
There's tons of spam about "solving" this after the Tech Bro boom, but I don't really buy anything I've seen. Nothing but a bunch of lead (or the Earth's atmosphere) is going to stop fat gamma rays or extremely fast nuclei.
Yeah, the temperature was an estimate for the nuclear reactor that would be needed lol, I tried to explain that most of the datacenter would be closer to room temperature which would require absurd sizes of radiators
To be fair, 100MW is pretty big.
AI doesn’t actually need that much. I’m pretty sure entire models like GLM 5.2 or Deepseek v4 are trained (and served) on a much, much smaller scale than a 100MW cluster.
But if that’s the case… why even invest in orbital data centers in the first place?
Why not desert ones? Why all this cash there instead of actually improving LLM architectures!?
There are so many nested levels of absurdity here. It’s all just total mania, with zero punishment to those doing the funding because they are too rich to feel any consequences.
Jesus Christ thank you for reminding me to confirm I keep his shit as far away from my pension as possible. Thankfully I'm in Canada so I feel there's a hope
Narrator: He was wrong.
Disagree with my pension and my RRSP I do have options for how I want to distribute my investments for example focusing on Canada or Europe or BRIC for investments or even dumping your money into a less risky but more stable money market. They're pretty diverse now.
Other guys comment, and the note about pension funds, is more about how things like the CPP will invest in SpaceX -- as will many ETF/bundled type 'funds' that people use. Things practically outside your control.
Yes, you and others can invest your personal wealth into whatever you want. But your gov old age stuff will invest into stuff like SpaceX regardless, and be exposed to potential risks should things collapse catastrophically.
CPP is mandated to make a set return for the Canadian people and it's pretty loose on now they do that. I agree it's concerning them looking at morally questionable companies but money wants to make money and I would argue Canadians care more about having money for their retirement than they do the companies they're investing in.
Case in point since Trump 45 we should have been collectively divesting in America yes we haven't. American companies even hostile ones still have a huge economic edge. I expect the CPP to be pragmatic and not invest based on their morals all the time. That makes for bad finances. Sucks but sadly this is the world.
So the narrator was correct?
Not mine. I'm selling my NASDAQ index fund next week. Thankfully the S&P said no.
This is probably the single most important thing we plebs can do.
For all his false promises: https://elonmusk.today/
Looks like the webmaster (do people still use that word?) is asleep at the wheel there.
Last update 266 days ago.
Good point
FPO: future promise offering
Elon musk also made seemingly impossible promises for Tesla and their stock price, and he exceeded them.
He didn't deliver on any promise except the stock price itself that's pumped up by lies and idiots believing in it.
That was the main promise lol
What technology promise did he make that he kept?
His promise of self-driving cars turned into a huge pile of accidents, especially since he insisted (still insists) that autopilot operate on a single sensor. Waymo uses five.
It's not like his companies did nothing. Getting his launch vehicles to land safely, vertically, was way cool, but a small step on the way to space colonies or space tourism.
He promised to get teslas share price and sales figures etc to a seemingly impossible level, and he exceeded it which is why he was then due his gigantic pay packet that the courts then ridiculously blocked. You guys are doing the same thing to SpaceX as you did for Tesla, and the results will be the same - you’ll look foolish.
FSD on Teslas is insane. It’s demonstrably safer than real drivers. It doesn’t use a single sensor, it uses a single type of sensor, which has proven to be more than good enough.
Calling reusable self landing rockets a “small step” is beyond a joke. It’s probably the single biggest innovation in space travel since space travel has been a thing.