Major Trump funder's company now a 'trainwreck'

Last week, Elon Musk’s SpaceX released its IPO prospectus in preparation for going public in June, and now that experts have had a chance to pore through its 277 pages, one analyst has bad news for interested investors: the company is a “trainwreck.”

This is according to Ed Elson, a prominent financial and tech analyst who is particularly well known among Gen-Z, who posted on Tuesday, “I read all 277 pages of SpaceX's IPO filing so you don't have to.” His nutshell assessment was not optimistic: “Losses up 700 percent. Revenue decelerating. 107x price-to-sales multiple. It's a trainwreck.” When you dig into its claims, he says, it’s “unserious, empty, hallucinatory, and borderline dishonest.”

Elson says that the fantastical elements of the filing are clear from the start.

“After eighteen images of rockets in space, we learn that the company’s mission is ‘to extend the light of consciousness to the stars,’” writes Elson. “To accomplish this, the company plans to advance humanity ‘to Kardashev Type II status,’ which is defined in the document as ‘a civilization that harnesses the full energy output of its local star.’ Only a few pages in and it’s already starting to feel like an ayahuasca trip.”

This “psychedelic language,” notes Elson, is peppered throughout the pitch, with “The light of consciousness” mentioned ten different times, “human augmentation” mentioned eleven times, and “first principles” twenty-seven times. “AI gets a mind-boggling 1,251 mentions — more features than the word ‘Jesus’ gets in the Bible.”

“Once you arrive at the financials,” he says, “you start to realize what the language is overcompensating for: awful numbers. The company generated $4.7 billion in Q1 2026, up only 15 percent from the year before (very low for an ‘AI company’). It also lost $4.3 billion, up 700 percent from the year before. That means the company is spending roughly twice as much as it makes (and on pace to explode those losses even more), while growing its topline six times slower than Nvidia and two times slower than my own podcast. There’s no getting around it — these numbers are terrible.”

The numbers look even worse when you compare them to 2025. The company’s revenue grew by 33 percent last year, meaning its business is actually decelerating.

“Meanwhile,” notes Elson, “net losses came in at $4.9 billion, so the company is on track to lose four times more money than it did last year. I’ll put it simply: slowing revenue + skyrocketing expenses = not good.”

All of this is even more farcical in the context of the company’s $2 trillion valuation, which Elson says does not reflect the actual financials. The stock will be priced at 107 times sales, making it one of the most expensive ever. As Elson notes, “It will be twice as valuable than Walmart while generating less revenue than Macy’s,” and when compared against other tech megacompanies that went public, the SpaceX valuation is “insane.” As Elson explains, “Meta went public at 28 times sales with 88 percent revenue growth. Google went public at 10 times sales with 234 percent growth. Put another way, SpaceX is growing seven times slower while asking for a multiple ten times higher.”

According to Elson, a closer analysis of the company’s actual position places its valuation closer to $500 billion. Still a lot, but still 75 percent less than the suggested number.

Other experts have raised their own concerns about the company’s IPO. According to the New York Times, SpaceX appears to be structured in a way that favors owner Elon Musk “at the expense of other shareholders.” And Barron’s warns that stock shoppers should invest at their “own risk,” noting that these types of high-profile IPOs tend to “underperform” and deliver "volatility" resulting in “negative returns."

Musk — who donated at $288 million to elect President Donald Trump — has faced accusations that his appointment as a “special government employee” at the head of DOGE allowed him to act with conflicts of interest regarding SpaceX’s government contracts. Government watchdogs note that since taking office, more and more of NASA’s funding has been diverted to Musk’s company.

Now, Musk is inviting the public to buy into that company, which Elson warns is more fantasy than business.

“The only way to get yourself mentally to $2 trillion is to believe that every possible sci-fi objective will be achieved, from data centers in space to asteroid mining to building cities on Mars,” he concludes. “Once you’ve done that, you then have to convince yourself that each of those endeavors will also make money. There’s optimism, and then there’s delusion.”

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