The value of this flight is huge now that SpaceX has some stock out there for trading.
If the thing explodes on the pad or goes flawlessly will be billions of $ spread.
Lucky 13: SpaceX aims for July 16 Starship flight test
UPDATED: SpaceX is scheduling another test flight of its monster Starship rocket later this week. Flight test 13 will carry 20 Starlink satellites and, hopefully, will not repeat the anomalies seen during the previous test. The mission is set to launch on Thursday, July 16, with a 90-minute launch window opening at 2245 UTC. It …
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Monday 13th July 2026 21:08 GMT DS999
Yes nearly the entire value of it is hopes and wet dreams, and irrational belief that Musk can do anything.
SpaceX stock is almost down to the IPO price, and nearly 10% below the lowest price you could buy into it on opening day. So everyone wasn't in on the IPO has lost money, and pretty soon everyone who wasn't an insider with pre-IPO stock will have lost money. Good thing the corrupt NASDAQ decided to abandon their old rule about companies having to trade for a year before getting on the index, they have made sure EVERYONE who holds a NASDAQ index fund as part of their investments has lost money on SpaceX!
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Tuesday 14th July 2026 03:22 GMT Sorry that handle is already taken.
Short interest in SpaceX appears to be 17%. A lot of people betting that it's overvalued, but fewer than I'd expected to be honest.
For comparison, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are all around 1%.
Even Gamestop, which once had a short interest greater than 100% (leading to a short squeeze, a pump & dump and endless hilarious financial conspiracy theories), is now "only" 14%.
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Tuesday 14th July 2026 19:41 GMT DS999
Shorting a stock whose value is based on irrationality is dangerous because people can remain irrational for a very long time. Tesla has been massively overvalued since forever - it has still lost more money than it has made over the time Musk has owned it. It is so far underwater it is likely it'll never turn positive on that metric. But it is still "valued" at over $1 trillion because Musk successfully moves the bar to the next hope and dream when the current one runs out. So first it was sold as an automaker that was going to compete with the big three but be much more profitable.
That never happened but then it was based on selling the self driving dream, claims that if you own a Tesla you will make $100K per year in income from it driving itself around on its own as a robotaxi. That also never happened, now the dream is robots. He's going to sell millions of robots a year and eventually everyone will own their own personal robot. This is also never going to happen, but by the time that becomes apparent Tesla will be about some new thing that's 5+ years out like the previous grifts so the stockholders can keep dreaming.
And the price will stay inflated, because there are always enough suckers who believe his lies to keep the stock price inflated that the fact its earnings barely justify a stock price of about 5% of what it actually trades for won't matter.
SpaceX will be the same. By the time the "datacenters in spaaaaace!" dream goes bust he'll be onto something new, like asteroid mining or selling land for a Mars colony that will keep the suckers interested.
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Thursday 16th July 2026 09:55 GMT Andy 73
Agreed
Just a year ago you would have received dozens of downvotes for saying such things.
The reality of Musk's "jam tomorrow" machine has taken a decade to be recognised by professionals on this site - which suggest that ill-informed retail investors (who make up the bulk of the investment in Tesla and Space-X) have many years yet before reality sinks in. Long enough for Musk to "declare success" and hand over the sinking ship to someone groomed to make him look good. He'll retire with status intact amongst his fans.
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Wednesday 15th July 2026 14:51 GMT werdsmith
and pretty soon everyone who wasn't an insider with pre-IPO stock will have lost money.
They might be down at that particular point in time, but if SpaceX is still going then they can recover their money in the future and possibly gain. Or lose more.
It's not like a horse race where it's over when the first nose passes the post, stock continues to modulate for years.
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Tuesday 14th July 2026 07:20 GMT fpx
SpaceX can be very profitable company because it can just increase the launch price for Starlink to whatever it feels like. And Starlink can be a very profitable company because, it can sell interconnect capacity to xAIs data centers in Space. And xAI can be a very profitable company, because every Optimus robot will require a subscription. Losing a few billions on Twitter is just a rounding error when you're thinking in trillions.
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Tuesday 14th July 2026 19:45 GMT DS999
China will be massively undercutting SpaceX's launch pricing in as short as 5 and definitely less than 10 years. The datacenters in space will never happen, because it is a profoundly stupid idea. And Optimus is going to be a big flop (and again, competing with China will be impossible for him)
You're obviously one of those suckers who believes his fables, so I'm sure you disagree but how do you explain all his other giant failures like robotaxis going nowhere, hyperloop being basically a tunnel with Teslas driving around that is a curiosity and nothing more, and so forth? The only things he succeeds at are things that didn't require any new technology just someone with enough money to plow into refining existing technology. Anything he claims that would require revolutionary new technology is always a scam - he has never done anything revolutionary before and never will.
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Tuesday 14th July 2026 08:39 GMT Vikingforties
Re: Did anyone...
Too many confounding variables to lean in with a calculation...
Rate of isostatic depression of the crust.
Future existence of the Indian Ocean given the geologic time period needed for SpaceX to get their kaboose into gear and launch that many rockets.
Willingness of the entire human population to dedicate themselves to welding and drilling for this scale of project.
Moral questions about continuing to rain down wreckage on the ecosystem that will start growing on the existing deposits.
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Tuesday 14th July 2026 08:32 GMT Vikingforties
Re: Did anyone...
You forgot isostatic depression. Add that much mass onto oceanic crust and it's going bend down under the load until it reaches a new lower equilibrium. Just for that reason we're going to need a LOT more Starships.
And then we've just distributed a small continent's worth of material half way around the globe. Now we're frigging about with the Earth's length of day.
This could be a great XKCD / Daedalus article.
Oh and I almost forgot, there will be volcanoes!
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