Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

SXX

You never know what inflation gonna be in futute. In some countries that turned into autocracies with strong and long standing leaders who love traditional values and religion inflation can easily be 30-70% a year. Then not only 4.3T reachable, but even 43T.

sometimelurker

thx adding a mode on this that prevents animations would be nice addition tho

Jblx2

A grammar corrected title might be better as: "Why SpaceX's 2040 Revenue Forecast of $4.3T is highly unlikely"

mentalfist

It's amazing we're in a timeline were people let stuff like this happen, against any sane logic.

DenverR

The actual takeaway question is "is Elon Musk on a frontier of his own — or is the market extrapolating one proven outlier onto an unproven one?" The HN title editorializes its own answer to the author's question.

bigyabai

> AN ESSAY IN SCROLLS I'd have preferred the essay. This kind of Claude Code landing page turns people off when the content is otherwise meaningful. The target audience will be looking for any reason to excuse this logic, and by vibe coding them a website you've given them their reason.

m3kw9

I know this sounds "bad" but early in Tesla's forcasts, I've seen many "highly unlikely" articles, but Tesla ended up blowing past expectations. This one is tough too, but I hate just dismiss it as unlikely especially with Elon at the helm

danielovichdk

I think the US is in such a fucked up place economically, that the stock market is so overheated and will cause grave inflation, but it's the only lever left to pull for the government, that it will cause havoc within the next 10 years. SpaceX or any of AI companies for that matter is absolutely not worth their money, but they will be carried through by government legislation, because otherwise the economy will be fucked for the US. SpaceX ... 4.3 trillion...what the fuck are you on about

ck2

I'm still struggling with the idea that 4,400 millionaires are going to be created overnight (out of 22,000 employees) Because many of them are going to sell sell sell at least half of their shares Which then means the value will PLUMMET

eggplantemoji69

Isn’t like 90% of their predicted revenue due to their AI products?

square_usual

I'm assuming this is vibe coded, because it's got a bunch of the usual tells, so to the people who do this: can you please stop making stupid scrolling presentations where I can see less than a slide of information at a time? Please tell your clanker to just write a blog post instead, or better yet, write it yourself.

d_silin

SpaceX already blown through a number of "... but this cannot be!" forecasts. Would not discount them easily.

sleepyguy

The US consumer cellular subscription service is around 185 billion a year and if you add business/enterprise it is around 225 billion a year. If they were able (highly unlikely) to capture that market in the US alone through Satellite Cellular service, it would be huge revenue stream. Setting up data centers in orbit (easier said than done) would be another huge revenue stream. Setting up facilities to beam down energy to earths surface could also be an opportunity. If I learned a good lesson, it's never say never....

wnmurphy

Another factor I don't see mentioned: every Trump policy is inflationary. Deporting the labor base, deterring legal immigration, applying tariffs that were basically derived by taking the trade deficit with a country and dividing by 2, and now locking up 20% of the global oil market by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. The Fed's response will have to be to raise rates, which is going to crush the multiple of any stock whose valuation is based on the expectation of massive growth.

killjoywashere

Elon making outrageous projections? Noooo.....

notorandit

Please, correct the typo in the title!

0xbadcafebee

I don't think some people understand how money works. If you say you're going to have $3.4T in revenue, someone has to have that money, and give it to you. So where is the money? Who has it? Are they spending it somewhere else right now, and will decide to instead spend it on SpaceX later? Or is the money just sitting in savings accounts, strangely not being spent or invested? And why would they put their money into SpaceX anyway? What has SpaceX said the $3.4T will be based on? 1. Space-based AI datacenters. Yes, they actually said that. Anyone who knows anything about space and datacenters knows this is insane. 2. Starlink. They're saying they're going to make $3.4T by... running an ISP. In space. 3. Starship. They are betting that so many people want to send junk into space that it'll make them $3.4T. 4. Possible Tesla merger. This would definitely bump up the numbers. But Tesla's future depends on cars, AI and robotics. The US's electric car market is in decline (Thanks, Trump!) and BYD is producing cheaper electric cars faster (though US buyers won't buy BYD's, the US electric car market isn't as big as the global market, and is smaller since removing tax rebates). It's clearly not a real AI competitor, if they just rented out their AI datacenters to the competition. And China is churning out robots constantly that actually work and are cheap. As you can see from other analyses ( https://fortune.com/2026/05/31/spacex-tesla-odds-of-merging-... ), their cash flow is actually much lower than they claim. The valuations are crazily high. SpaceX/Tesla's claims of how they're going to make money verges on snake oil.

themgt

It's funny it concludes "A line is not a law" while the entire page is just lines and charts. If you didn't know anything going in, SpaceX might as well be a company selling toilet paper for all you learned. I've got no idea what a share of SpaceX is worth today or 14 years from now, but fully reusable rockets are going to be one of the most important engineering achievements in human history, and SpaceX appears far in the lead to getting there first. Ignoring everything else they're at the cutting edge of. It's really just sad to me how upset how many people are about an IPO. "Imagine what a waste, if the stock market were to overvalue the company dedicated to solving the challenges required to make humanity a multi-planetary species, when this graph clearly shows we could've wisely allocated more of civilization's resources to Saudi Aramco."

Avshalom

To Be Fair: this is half of what Morgan Stanley said the metaverse would be worth, clearly they learned to be more bearish...

panzi

The animated graphics are fancy, but can anyone with a screen reader tell us how that "looks" to them? The graphics are all one SVG mixed together with different parts set to opacity: 0. The accessibility tree in Firefox gives you all the labels randomly mixed together. If that is how people with screen reader "see" it, its unusable. Maybe make the graphic aria-hidden and add an empty tag with aria-description (or other kind of tag only screen readers see) describing the current graphic to each slide.