SpaceX IPO: “The share price rose when the market opened, but watch out in a couple of weeks”

The usual pitch: at a markdown, with a hefty discount, at the factory price; don’t miss this opportunity to live off your investments; if you have money, don’t let it sit idle—your capital has to work (sic, and sic again).

A few days ago, I told you that I had been offered the chance to buy SpaceX shares... Yours truly, who may be an idiot but not when the sales are on, knew, or thought he knew, that Elon Musk couldn’t care less about me, just as he couldn’t care less about his first bout of gonorrhoea, and that he owes his fortune more to suckers than to his supposed genius.

I also knew that capital does not work. I have never seen ten million dollars putting in a shift. The ones who work are the poor mugs, the sole source of value. Everything else is divvying up the spoils, speculation, “hand me your money and I’ll give you a receipt,” “if I catch you, I’ll screw you,” and that sort of financial transaction.

What follows is not mine; I am simply quoting the Paris financial daily La Tribune of 12 June. You do not even have to buy it, just read the digital edition:

Hallelujah! Buuut... the same newspaper warned: “Beware of the fall.”

Although SpaceX saw its revenue rise by 33% in 2025, it still posted a net loss of $4.9 billion. Its xAI lost $1 billion a month, while its conversational chatbot Grok failed to gain market share from ChatGPT or Gemini. And now the fall has already begun. Do not worry about Elon Musk, his money is safe. But the fools who bought shares include the AFP pension funds... in other words, workers’ money...

For your edification, instruction and general knowledge... there are so many thousands of listed shares that AFP pension funds use modern management methods: programs that run automatically, using patched-together algorithms to detect and distinguish, amid that whole mess, which shares are rising and therefore have to be bought. Are you following me?

The AFP charges you to buy rubbish, and it charges you to sell it when the opportunity arises (if you will pardon the expression). The loser is the poor mug who pays contributions every month so that Elon Musk can claim to be the first “trillionaire in history,” even if the story lasts barely two or three weeks.

I say this because today, 27 June, another financial newspaper, Les Échos, carried the following:

Forbes in the United States put it this way on 19 June:

Has your AFP never told you about that?!

When Elon Musk saw yet another fortune landing in his hands, he hurried to “dilute” it. He bought another company, Cursor, for the modest sum of $60 billion in shares, resulting in 3.4% dilution. This means that investors’ holdings will represent a smaller percentage of the company’s valuation.

He paid for it with shares: that way, he preserves and increases his own stake while reducing the stake held by the fools who bought SpaceX shares... Is that clear? The term valuation, and by no means value, matters because SpaceX does not produce a damn thing, yet the financial markets and the fools assign it a valuation in order to buy and sell shares. Now you see it, now you don’t: the money has vanished. Neither David Copperfield nor Harry Houdini could have done it better.

Some analysts, for their part, dare to dissent from the official orthodoxy. That is how they make a living. This is the case with analysts at Morningstar, who lowered their estimate of SpaceX’s fair value to $62, citing “substantial dilution” of SpaceX shares following the purchase of Cursor. They nevertheless noted, one can never be too cautious, that an optimistic scenario would value the shares at $169 if xAI’s revenue improved. A radically optimistic scenario, given that AI companies, as far as anyone knows, have so far produced nothing but losses. I tend to think that readers are sensibly sceptical, which is why I shall end by quoting some other “experts”: HLN (Het Laatste Nieuws, a Dutch-language publication based in Antwerp, Belgium), which reported the following on 23 June: Musk risks losing his status as a trillionaire: what is happening at SpaceX?

After shooting up like a rocket, SpaceX shares, which made their stock-market debut two weeks ago, have already lost a great deal of ground despite a massive influx of investors. This raises the question: are those investors right to entrust their money to Elon Musk?

That is the million-dollar question... As you know, yours truly already had the answer before the diarrhoea-a full-blown bout of viral gastroenteritis-that I have just described broke out.