This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Is musk the first person to lose 1 trillion dollars? Quite the honor.
I'd be celebrating this more if it wasn't the retail investors getting screwed
We ain't seen nothing yet. In 2-3 weeks the Q2 report will release at which 20% of stocks held by employees will be unlocked, which has hit even profitable and not-fantasy-based companies hard in the past. There will also be a wave of resignations from people who cash out and if that takes key people then investors back off even further. My guess is fElon wants the stock to stay high until next summer when he can sell, but he NEEDS it to stay high until November when early investors can cash out. He has borrowed billions from people you wouldn't want to owe $1 and been delaying and juggling for a few years with tacking together this SpaceX nonsense amalgamation.
In 2-3 weeks the Q2 report will release at which 20% of stocks held by employees will be unlocked, which has hit even profitable and not-fantasy-based companies hard in the past.
When you consider the kind of life changing amounts of money even a few thousand shares sell for at current rates, they'd be crazy not to.
My guess is fElon wants the stock to stay high until next summer when he can sell, but he NEEDS it to stay high until November when early investors can cash out
It's fallen maybe 12% since the IPO. You're talking about shares that were trading for a few bucks during the original debt offerings. Marc Andressen has something like a 6000% ROI on his holdings even at current prices.
If this company dropped by 50%, it would still be worth in the $800B range. There's no world in which current shareholders don't make fuckoff amounts of profit. The only question is whether we're talking nine figures or ten.
50% might prove optimistic. The rules that were bent for SpaceX exist for reasons. The August dump will be 4X the shares already in the wild. You are right, employees would be crazy not to sell at current rates. SpaceX employees are probably smart and/or educated enough to read the white papers on all these science fantasy projects and know they are pure fantasy. Cool stuff to fire up investment bros, but not the kind of thing they want to be tasked with trying to make reality. Point being, the floor for what an employee would not sale is going to be really low. True believers might hold, but anyone who smells the BS or just likes money will gleefully sell at 50% of current.
Meanwhile, China is making great strides in VTVL and much cheaper, open source LLMs. The EU is eager to find home grown or at the least not-American tech solutions. Every headline makes SpaceX look less and less likely to make ANY profits, let alone completely dominate supposedly multi-trillion dollar markets.
SpaceX employees are probably not happy about being used as a dumping ground for an AI black hole company. I expect many are counting the days until they can leave.
The August dump will be 4X the shares already in the wild.
So, from 1% of market cap to 2%?
Spread over shareholders who still hold north of 90% of the company?
Meanwhile, China is making great strides in VTVL and much cheaper, open source LLMs. The EU is eager to find home grown or at the least not-American tech solutions.
China (and India and Brazil, among others) are all making huge investments in aerospace. The EU is certainly making a lot of noise, but because everything is privatized to fuck, what you're left with is guess like Richard Branson paddin wallets while programs like the FCAS flounder.
Every headline makes SpaceX look less and less likely to make ANY profits
Starlink is still the modern word in satellite communication. That's worth a few hundred billion on it's face.
Will this advantage last? Idk. Probably not, but maybe.
At a minimum, if you want to be friendly with America, you'll need to buy from Musk.
Is that going to be 20% of stock held by each employee can be sold, or 20% of employees can sell their stock?
If it's the latter then yes, I can see them cashing out and leaving.
That's because it was severely over valued for a company that produces no product and makes no profit.
To be fair it was a solid pump and dump.
You mean creating a worldwide communication system that has to be completely relaunched every half decade that is the exact opposite of profitable isn't sustainable!?
Actually the Starlink division itself is profitable.
The unprofitable part is Twitter and xAI which got merged in right before the IPO.
SpaceX was actually on the path to being quite profitable, but then Musk tried to hide his two biggest money sinks inside it.
Profitable like Tesla? That is not actually profitable without a big chunk (like a third) of their money from government subsidies.
https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/117956/documents/HMKP-119-JU00-20250226-SD003.pdf
It appears SpaceX may not be as highly leveraged with the government with only 20% of its total revenue from government contracts.
It is interesting to look this up but ultimately what I mean is long term profitability considering they will have to continuously replace their satellites every 5-10 years.
The combining of his companies is a whole other level of fuckery that regulators should have smacked down instantly, but you know reality.
So I have a question, for the people that want these stocks taxed at market value. What happens in this situation? Would the company and Elon get a refund from the government?
I would say that they should just get taxed at what ever the price is on December 31 or January 01.
If you lose money you can claim it as a loss just as you would when you sell for a loss, up to a certain limit.
So if the buyers are wonting to buy at a hype price, you have to pay a ton in taxes on unrealized gains meaning you need to sell stock to cover the cost, and pay taxes on the sell, then next year when evaluations go to normal levels you get to write off losses from zero income because you didn't sell and want to keep your shares meaning you get nothing back?
Would the company and Elon get a refund from the government?
These shares were issued at the rate of dollars. Nobody selling their shares at IPO lost money.
After that, for the poor fools at EchoStar who took a very late position just before IPO at $212/share? They've always been entitled to write off shares at a loss.
You don't get a refund per say, but you do get tax loss carryover. So, if you lost $1M last year and you made $1M this year, you can tell the IRS that it's a push and you earned nothing.
I think you have a free concepts incorrect. You can't write off the lose unless you sell, and you are capped at 3k a year loss write-off as an individual.
Also elon hasn't sold any shares so this isn't relevant to him. I'm taking about other that want Elon to pay taxes on unrealized gains. What do you do in a situation were he paid taxes on unrealized gains and the stock losses value. Do you get a refund?
You can’t write off the lose unless you sell, and you are capped at 3k a year loss write-off as an individual.
You are taxed on your realized gains, absolutely. You can only write a maximum of $3k in losses off your total wages + investments income. But that's net losses. So, if you report a $50,000 gain and a $40,000 loss off two transactions in a year, you report a net $10,000 realized gain for the year as Schedule B (investment) income.
In the reverse scenario ($50k loss, $40k gain), you could deduct $3k from your wage income and start the following year with a $7k loss.
In an extreme example - $50M loss - you can spend the rest of your life writing down against it. This creates an incentive to overstate the value of property when you are writing it down in bankruptcy (a popular maneuver among the Trump clan).
I get all that but that didn't answer my question.
What? A company that is making -5 billion net income lost 1 trillion in market value?!
He's such a loser not even his stock wants to hang around with him
Sadly Here, hé is not a loser. Things happened exactly the way he wanted to. He won big, his idiot fans lost bigger
I wont dispute that he certainly benefited from being able to buy entire countries and pay off any regulatory agency he didnt go at with an axe, but I think we all lost out as a result, not just his fanboys
Its everything I hoped for.
he can drop still further
This is the sort of news that achieve nothing and only give this guy visibility
Sell side stock news is usually made to help retail investors lose money. They will pile on to this thing for a few more weeks then reverse it back up to 3 trillion. Rinse wash repeat. And you have infinite money generator 2.0
Insider trading 101 right here
hmm
So he's a minusaire now?
Guys, can we please to giving that our attention? That thing will go down, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, up and down. We do we talk and write about it? Ignore it...
Why are we making the mistake again and again to give assholes attention?
How does one short a stock? Like what is the process? Do I need a special broker?
If you think the whole stock market looks like a bubble right now, you could invest in commodities and wait for the crash indefinitely.
IMHO it's better to not trust the stock market at all. It's a big club and we ain't in it.
Shorting a stock is a bad plan. You typically need collateral (cash, or a line of credit, or something) in case the short goes bad. Shorting a stock can have a theoretically infinite loss since if you buy a share of a company and it goes bankrupt, your maximum loss is the value of the share. Short selling means you've sold a share you don't own with a pinky swear that you'll buy one back to replace it. A stock likely won't, but could, go infinitely high. In that case you'd have infinite losses.
The other way is options trading. You can do this with your normal broker, possibly. You'll need to make statements about your income level, savings, risk tolerance, and check a box saying you've read some mandated documentation. The process can seem like click-through stuff for a normal website, but it's absolving the brokerage of fault if your decisions go bad.
Options work a little like an insurance contract. If you are worried that you're too heavily tilted towards a certain company (but still believe in the investment), you can buy "puts" that help mitigate the risk if the underlying security. A "call" is a contract that lets you hedge the other way. They let you get exposure to a security without having to purchase the shares. An options contract is a contract that gives you the right, but not the obligation to buy (call) or sell (put) some number (typically 100) of an underlying security by a certain date. Selling options naked is a topic better left for someone else to explain all the risks involved (and I covered a strategy that has infinite risk).
A call pays off if the stock shoots up before the contract expires, and a put pays off if the stock tanks. To do what you're saying you'd have to buy puts (I'm not an investment advisor, I'm not your investment advisor, this is not investment advice). If it sounds like gambling that's because it is. Everybody already had the idea to bet against SPCX. There are platforms out there that let you look and see without having to risk money, and that's probably the best course of action.
I picked the date September 18, 2026 at random. If you had a September 18 130P, then it went up 21.19% Friday, kudos. The "last price" field is PER SHARE, and the contract was probably for 100 shares, so that's $2030, meaning you had four figures on the line there. If none of that makes sense, if the activity in the volume field doesn't make sense, then it's better to sit it out. In that realm you're swapping your money for that contract, and someone else is swapping that contract for your (now their) money. If the contract expires out of the money, you lose.
Some resources:
There have been suicides from people who didn’t really understand how shorting works.
Thank you for the detailed analysis. I really want to... but the rational side of me says I shouldn't 😆.
I've seen a few news stories through the years where I thought the stock movement was out of whack with the underlying security, and options are a way to "bet" on that being right. It's cheap and easy to just watch. Almost every time I was wrong and only found out a few times why. That probably just means I'm bad at it.
A few more things to remember. If you look at the first link at the bottom of my post, there are ways to structure buying/selling the calls/puts so that you can have a strategy that pays off if the stock goes up, down, or stays the same. How to set those up and the math involved is beyond me. The other thing is that for every trade with options someone makes there's an entity on the other side of it. You might be buying a part of the leg of someone else's more complex trade where a big investment house is trying to manage their risk and keep it below a certain level.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/business/robinhood-suicide-alex-kearns/
Stay smart and safe, invest money you can afford to lose in products you understand.
This is just gambling with extra steps. Thanks for the analysis and your time to write all that up, though.
Good. Maybe one day the investors will see this idiot for what he is: a greedy racist fascist. And stop investing in his bullshit.
They won't do that. They're also greedy racist fascists. That's what capitalism is.
