The SpaceX and AI IPOs: Financial catastrophes in the making?

CONTEXT

In coming ~4-10 months, three behemoths plan to file papers for IPOs, Musk’s SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic (also AI). None of these IPOs make a lick of sense based on current company valuations, the cash already sunk in, and their vaporware business models. When retail and professional investors buy IPO stock and the insider lock-up periods expire within ~6 months, they are going to lose, lose, lose. 

Despite the obvious but nonetheless breathtaking stupidity of it all, most MSM reporting focuses on the galactic size of the deals or on the juicy personalities involved, e.g., Musk owns ~85% of SpaceX and his IPO would push him close to being a trillionaire. Most of the MSM loves reporting all the big numbers and juicy gossip. They fucking ignore the hyper-crappy business models behind these IPOs. 

Here's a fun example of the MSM’s irrational exuberance reporting. Nicolas Owens, an equity researcher with the investment research firm Morningstar, said that while SpaceX’s IPO was enormous, commenting: “A trillion-dollar market capitalization for a company going public used to be unheard-of. Now it seems normal.” [1]

Germaine: No, a trillion market cap does not seem remotely close to normal, you blithering idiot. How much is Musk paying Morningstar to say such outrageous bullshit? It must be a lot. 

Idiot squad: Yee-Haw! Musk has 13 babies we know of, with some attached baby lawsuits. Now back to the deal, what comes after trillion? Oh yeah, quadrillion (1,000 trillion)! That's the next new thing!! I wanna buy into a quadrillion deal, right now!!

The SPACEX deal

Public information releases indicate SpaceX is targeting a valuation in the roughly 1.5–2.0 trillion dollar range. The IPO would raise roughly 50–75 billion dollars in the offering. That’s the largest IPO in history. SpaceX generated ~18–19 billion dollars of revenue in 2025 and still loses billions per year. That valuation implies ~60–100 times forward sales, and near 100 times trailing sales. Those multiples are far above the most highly valued mega‑cap tech firms usually get. Independent analysts who try to back into earnings needed to justify a $1.5 trillion market cap estimate that SpaceX would have to be earning roughly $80 billion/year within about a decade. FFS, that’s more than Berkshire Hathaway’s recent profits and in the same neighborhood as the “Magnificent Seven” giants. WTF? Link, link

To make those numbers work, Musk’s IPO marketing blither leans on a fantastically large total addressable market (TAM) covering not only launch and satellite internet, but also AI infrastructure, cloud compute, consumer subscriptions, advertising, and enterprise AI applications. One widely discussed Musk “analysis” attributes roughly $28–28.5 trillion of future annual TAM to SpaceX’s combined businesses. There is a few hundred billion for space “solutions” (whatever that means), about 1.6 trillion for Starlink broadband and mobile, 2.4 trillion for AI infrastructure, hundreds of billions for consumer subscriptions (bullshit alert!) and digital ads, and more than 22 trillion for enterprise AI applications (whatever that means). Analysts note that this implies (1) a target market roughly the size of the entire current US economy, and (2) an enterprise AI market tens of times larger than today’s entire enterprise software industry, while also effectively assuming that every single household will come to use Starlink connectivity. These inputs are not professional, mainstream consensus forecasts. Those numbers are Musk’s blue‑sky fantasy, Musk‑centric marketing bullshit. Musk’s BS is presented to rationalize the IPO numbers and sell the deal to people and investors dumb enough but believe Musk’s BS and rich enough to piss away some of their own, or someone else’s, money. 

Verdict: The SpaceX IPO is a vaporware rip-off, but it probably is legal!

The OpenAI, and Anthropic deals

This story is just as good a deal, or bad depending on how you see it. 

The lock-up story: As with the SpaceX deal, these two companies may be considering a “staggered lock‑up”, where existing shareholders can sell in waves rather than a single cliff, potentially starting almost immediately after the IPO. The lock-up is a period where insiders who bought stock at a low price before the IPO have to wait a while before they can sell after an IPO. Once those lock-up periods expire, usually 90-180 days, the stock price can drop like a rock, leaving the IPO investors eating huge losses. 

There are variations. SpaceX’s IPO uses a staggered, tiered lock‑up where insiders can sell specified percentages at multiple dates instead of a single 6‑month cliff. Some selling is allowed relatively soon after the IPO and around earnings. No final lock‑up language is public yet for OpenAI and Anthropic.

The business hype and fantasy: OpenAI and Anthropic both lean hard on “world‑defining” narratives and trillion‑scale market projections to justify IPO‑level valuations. However, their hype rhetoric glosses over very large, long‑term loss profiles and massive execution risks. Recent marketing hype paints OpenAI as a hyper‑growth but deeply loss‑making “juggernaut”. By contrast, Anthropic spin is it’s the more “disciplined, safety‑centric” alternative, Both companies assert huge, largely unproven assumptions about how big and profitable their modeled market actually gets. Link, link, link

OpenAI: Reporting to investors emphasize that OpenAI’s run‑rate revenue could hit roughly 20 billion annually, but notes forecasts of around 14 billion in losses in 2026 and cumulative losses potentially exceeding 100 billion by the end of the decade due to compute and infrastructure spending. The core argument is that enormous, upfront expenses will eventually create a dominant AGI platform with decades of high‑margin returns, while near‑term modeling is spun as “spend first, profits much later”. 

Reporting to retail investors repeat projections that the addressable AI market will be measured in the tens of trillions over time. The hype implies that OpenAI is poised to capture a huge slice of that, but while also warning that its valuation relative to its actual sales is stretched and that profits may not arrive until the 2030s. Link

Anthropic: Multiple reports say Anthropic is pursuing, or has privately discussed, valuations on the order of 900 billion, with funding‑round coverage emphasizing that it has “closed in on a 1 trillion valuation” ahead of an IPO. That puts Anthropic fairly close to OpenAI, despite being smaller in revenue. 

Anthropic’s marketing and sympathetic commentary spin a “do more with less” strategy. That emphasizes algorithmic efficiency, better training data, and more careful deployment, whatever that means. It does not try to match OpenAI’s extreme compute arms race. Pieces on its communication strategy stress that it is deliberately telling a “profitability and integrity” story, arguing revenue increase of 10x per year for several years, a dedicated “social impacts” team (whatever that means), and a brand built around safety and trust as a differentiator. 

That sales pitch is flimsy at best. Deceptive is a better description of Anthropic hype.

Probably the most likely way that OpenAI, and Anthropic marketing can come remotely close to business projections is to believe that their main product will be replacing millions of workers from their jobs. Consumer subscriptions and other BS markets cannot come anywhere close to meeting the sales propaganda behind their gigantic IPO scam.

Verdict: These IPOs are a vaporware rip-off, but they probably are legal!

Q: Could the end of the lock-up periods for SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic trigger a massive collapse of American financial markets and economy?[2]

Footnote:

1. In it's defense, Morningstar explicitly says that the targeted $780 billion IPO valuation implies that the company is significantly overvalued. It warns that investors might get better stock prices after the IPO. But it does not say investors will ever make any money.  

2. Consensus financial expert analysis says that the end of the lock-up periods will not trigger a massive collapse of American financial markets or the American economy. Maybe that expert analysis is correct. We might get an opportunity to find out. As the experts tell us over and over, past performance does not predict future returns. 

Sooner or later we will be dragged down by, the combination of (1) MAGA’s economically inefficient corruption and gross governance incompetence, plus (2) massive growing and unsustainable federal debt (~$40 trillion on the books, and ~$75 trillion off the books), plus (3) vast damage to democracy, rule of law, civil liberties, and the public interest. Sooner or later something is going to snap. The herd (investors and the public) will spook. The stampede for the exit doors will blow the building to smithereens. Arguably, the question is when, not if. 

A summary of Trump/elite MAGA environmental policy: Tracking the flow of wealth and power, cost and benefit

 CONCLUSION

In summary, analyses of Trump/MAGA policy estimate that their deregulatory program sacrifices over a hundred billion dollars a year in public health and climate benefits, including thousands of avoidable deaths and tens of thousands of new asthma cases. That public cost saves a smaller number of fossil‑fuel and industrial firms their costs of complying with pollution controls. Legal scholars argue that the administration has deliberately rewired environmental law and cost‑benefit analysis so that regulatory power and wealth flow upward. That flow is from American society, which bears the pollution and climate damage, to a few elites and corporations who profit from polluting on us.

TRUMP AND MAGA ELITE ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY & TACTICS

Researchers show that major oil, gas companies, plastics and other pro-pollution companies knew about climate and related risks decades ago. Nonetheless, they poured large amounts of money into lobbying, political influence buying, and disinforming the public. The obvious pro-pollution propaganda goal, just like cigarette companies’ pro-lung cancer-for-profit propaganda goal years before, was to block, delay or weaken regulations that would affect their business models for as long as possible, preferably forever. Pro-pollution companies engaged in a well-funded, decades-long disinformation and mass deceit and political influence-buying strategy specifically to prevent significant climate laws and regulations from coming into effect, or from being enforced. By the 1960s, major oil companies knew that fossil-fuel combustion caused climate change, so they responded by funding political and social denial and delay campaigns to block regulations.
https://commonhome.georgetown.edu/topics/climateenergy/defense-denial-and-disinformation-uncovering-the-oil-industrys-early-knowledge-of-climate-change/
https://www.ucs.org/climate/accountability

Tech and auto companies aggressively brand themselves as green while relying heavily on offsets and systems that allow continued pollution. Tesla and some other Big Tech actors use climate propaganda and market positioning enable them to profit off people’s climate anxiety while still engaging in pro-pollution businesses with their carbon-intensive supply chains.
https://gizmodo.com/five-of-2020s-top-climate-grifters-1845803712

The ask: At an April 2024 Mar‑a‑Lago dinner, Trump met with top oil and gas executives and asked them to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He told them it would be a great deal compared with the taxes and regulations they would avoid if he returned to office. A 2025 analysis of fossil‑fuel donors and Trump’s policy agenda notes that “Trump asked oil and gas executives in 2024 to raise $1 billion for his campaign and told them he’d grant their policy wish list if he won.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/fossil-fuel-industry-donors-see-major-returns-trumps-policies
https://blog.ucs.org/laura-peterson/trumps-handouts-to-fossil-fuel-industry-will-cost-public-80-billion-over-next-decade/

The payoff: Trump has (1) systematically gutted the EPA’s regulatory and enforcement capacity and authority, and (2) blocked or dismantled enforcement of essentially all major environmental and climate rules, especially greenhouse gas laws and regulations. In return of polluter payoffs, Trump and MAGA elites gutted the EPA’s scientific and legal backbone in what Trump bluntly calls the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. He gutted the EPA’s rule eliminating the 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding. That had been the legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The final rule rescinds the finding and all federal GHG emission standards for vehicles and engines, and explicitly states that EPA “has no legal basis” to regulate GHGs under section 202 going forward. By revoking the Endangerment Finding, the federal government can no longer regulate greenhouse gases. That includes emissions from cars, trucks and power plants. That was a gigantic neutering of climate policy. Eliminating the finding completely stopped enforcement of carbon emissions limits. That is a huge payoff.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/president-trump-and-administrator-zeldin-deliver-single-largest-deregulatory-action-us
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0zdd7yl4vo
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/trump-administration-plans-to-roll-back-epa-regulations-could-harm-health/

The deceit and betrayal: As we know by now, Trump and MAGA elites always do their best to deceive the public about whatever corruption and dictatorship/oligarchy/ theocracy they are up to. From a public interest, pro-democracy and pro-rule of law point of view, their lies, crackpottery, and emotional manipulation are shameless, blatant, malicious, and morally rotted. Trump and MAGA elites frame deregulation as re‑directing enforcement, not gutting regulations for polluters. An EPA news release describes gutting laws and regulations as redirecting enforcement resources to relieve the economy of unnecessary bureaucratic burdens. That is a clear signal of a deliberate shift away from enforcing certain pollution regulations and laws. MAGA propaganda casts it as efficiency, but in reality it’s cessation of enforcement.
https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregulatory-action-us-history
https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/trump-epa-rollbacks-would-weaken-rules-projected-to-save-billions-of-dollars-

The impacts on public health and the flow of wealth and power: The Trump/MAGA environmental and deregulatory agenda is projected to produce major adverse environmental and health impacts, along with a massive shift in power and wealth toward fossil‑fuel and other regulated industries from the public and the public interest to special interests. The second Trump administration’s rollbacks of environmental and energy regulations could cost about $156.6 billion per year in net social benefits that existing rules would have delivered. Approximately 3,299 additional premature deaths annually, 7,461 new child asthma cases per year, roughly 3,922 extra hospital and ER admissions annually, and hundreds of thousands of lost work and school days as a result of weakened air‑quality and climate rules. Greenhouse gas regulations reduce co‑pollutants including fine particulate matter and ozone. Eliminating regulations will increase heat‑related mortality, wildfire smoke exposure, respiratory and cardiovascular hospitalizations, preterm births, and asthma attacks. Trump’s gutting of environmental deregulations walks back pesticide bans, weakens methane and CO₂ emissions rules, and narrowed the definition of waters of the United States, allowing for more a lot more pollution of fresh waters.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/trump-administration-plans-to-roll-back-epa-regulations-could-harm-health/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-trump-administrations-major-environmental-deregulations/
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-assault-on-environmental-protections-will-give-polluters-a-free-pass-while-causing-millions-of-asthma-attacks/

Trump and MAGA elites do not care about public opinion

By gutting rules and neutering enforcement that generated net economic and health benefits, the Trump Administration has taken away billions in benefits from the American public. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of cost savings from deregulation flow to a relatively small number of regulated firms and individuals. Meanwhile the foregone benefits or cleaner air, avoided deaths, lower medical costs, are spread across millions of people. Society eats the damage, while a few elites reap the rewards. Trump officials reshaped cost‑benefit analysis, cynically undervalued pollution harms, and adopted novel statutory interpretations that abdicate EPA authority to regulate. These moves created explicit preferences for the interests of regulated industries over communities most affected. The Trump/elite MAGA goal is to lock in a long‑term transfer of wealth and power from public regulators to private industry. Oil and gas firms will gain tens of billions in avoided compliance costs and new drilling opportunities. That will be financed in part by the loss of the public’s health and climate protections and the transfer of environmental and social damage back onto American society. Benefits flow up to a few elites and corporations, while costs and damages flush down onto society.
https://policyintegrity.org/tracking-regulatory-rollbacks
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/deconstructing-environmental-deregulation-under-the-trump-administration/
https://climatepower.us/news/new-report-oil-and-gas-industry-spent-450-million-to-influence-trump-and-the-119th-congress/
https://www.nrdc.org/resources/white-house-watch-tracking-attacks-our-environment-health

That stuff is toxic

Source: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2025/6/23/voters-are-concerned-about-rolling-back-epa-power-plant-regulations-want-current-pollution-limits-kept-in-place

Trump guts a major ocean climate science research project to hide terrifying inconvenient facts to protect polluters

Trump’s intense hostility to climate science is not merely irrational and stupid. It is mentally deranged and extremely dangerous to everyone. Various sources are reporting that Trump and ordered his MAGA goons to destroy the the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). That is a US funded, $368 million deep-ocean monitoring network that has been central to understanding climate-relevant ocean processes and coastal risks. Trump has ordered it to be taken out of the water. More than 900 instruments deployed off Alaska, Washington/Oregon, the East Coast, and the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland are to be removed and shut down. 

The system became operational in 2016. It was designed to last for about 25 years. The cost to operate it was ~$48 million per year. Trump repeatedly tried to slash the program’s budget by about 80 percent for 2025 and 2026. OOI instruments off the coast of Newport, Ore., and Grays Harbor, Wash., collected and transmitted temperature, acidity, and oxygen level data that is needed for predicting climate-related environmental changes, and the health of the region’s commercial fishing industry. 

An OOI data transmission buoy

Long-term observing systems like OOI are critical for detecting climate change because climate changes typically emerge over a period of decades from noisy weather patterns. Once a continuous record is broken, especially in key locations like the subpolar North Atlantic or deep sea upwelling locations, scientists cannot go back and reconstruct the missing years with anything close to the accuracy of direct ocean measurements. The OOI underpins our current understanding of marine heat waves, ocean heat uptake, and biogeochemical processes that directly affect fisheries and coastal communities. From a scientific-program point of view, shutting down a system designed for 25 years after roughly a decade is another example of Trump and MAGA politics gutting the public interest to pay off special interests who profit from continuing to pollute.

The shutdown of OOI cannot be rationally understood to be a claimed neutral budget decision. The shutdown fits squarely into Trump’s and MAGA elites’ objective of (1) dismantling climate science, gutting NOAA and NSF climate research, and (2) erasing data that document fossil‑fuel damage, all while pledging to end what Trump and MAGA elites like to call the Green New Scam.

Q: Is a deceived, ignorant electorate easier to deceive, exploit and profit from than an undeceived and informed electorate?

Q: What or who is the real scam here, climate science research or Trump, MAGA elites and their way of doing business?

Info sources: Link, link, link, link, link

Trump subverts the rule of law — federal law is now the rule of the tyrant

The first pardon on the list is Jan. 21, 2026, the day after Trump was sworn into office

Trump and MAGA elites have made clear that they use the rule of law as a special interest-serving partisan tool. To them, it’s not a neutral institution for vindicating laws or defending the public interest. AP-Frontline reporting makes the painful truth undeniable.

In this instance of Trump personally, directly subverting the rule of law, he has quietly ordered his personal DoJ to stop investigating Venezuela’s acting president and major drug dealer, Delcy Rodríguez. Rodriguez has been a target of the US Drug Enforcement Administration due to her drug kingpin activities. As can be expected from our now corrupted DoJ, they lie to us about it, a spokesperson saying “there was never an investigation into her to shut down”. This is an example of how Trump and MAGA elites have degenerated our rule of law into corrupt, cruel rule of tyrants.

AP and other sources have reported that Delcy Rodríguez was on the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s radar for years. She was designated a DEA “priority target” in 2022. That label is reserved for suspects believed to have a significant impact on the drug trade. Link

By now, Trump has a solid track record of sympathy for drug dealers, which Rodriguez seems to be. That is in addition to sympathy for rioters, tax cheats, inside stock traders, fraudsters and various other criminal miscreants and thugs who can afford to buy a pardon from Trump for their crimes. The going rate for buying a Trump pardon is estimated to be least about $1 million/pardon (and this). The DoJ still keeps track of his pardons. The DoJ makes the pardon list public at this link. At least until March of 2026, the DoJ updated the pardon list. Since then, public updates to the list have stopped. Of course, that is exactly what one would expect from Trump hiding his deep moral rot from the public.

Anyway, Trump’s protection for criminals is not new or out of character. Trump is a criminal with his own track record of criminality and contempt for the rule of law. Here are more of Trump’s pardons for criminals convicted of selling or trafficking marijuana, cocaine, or other drugs.

Trump loves pardoning criminals, assuming they can afford to pay him his pardon fee.

Q: Why do you think that the DoJ no longer publicly updates Trump’s list of pardons and commutations?

Q: Given Trump’s rock solid track record as a criminal, chronic liar and morally rotted tyrant who demands loyalty to himself over all other things, is there any solid reason to believe that (1) his loyalist DoJ is not protecting his pardons-for-profit business by no longer updating the public pardons list, or (2) Rodriguez has not engaged in any drug dealing activities?