Business Pants
Business Pants
Free Float Media Inc.
SpaceX fetish IPO, Trump’s Chinese phone, beef vs. Ebola, AI religious exemption
1 hour 5 minutes Posted Jun 12, 2026 at 5:44 pm.
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Story of the Week (DR):
SuperBroIpoDystopia: Some key facts: MM
a record-breaking $135 per share with$1.8T valuation
To make that math make sense, analysts estimate the company needs to grow its sales by 50% every single year for the next decade
SpaceX lost $4.9B last year
Wall Street is Being Treated Like Order-Takers: Musk pre-set the IPO price strictly at $135 and dictating exactly which investors got allocations. This forced major investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to act as glorified order-takers without even knowing their exact compensation beforehand
Saudi Aramco $1.7T; Alibaba: $237B; Facebook $118B
Nasdaq aggressively pushed through "fast-entry" rule changes specifically to allow mega-caps like SpaceX to bypass the traditional year of seasoning and enter the Nasdaq-100 in just 15 trading days. This forces passive index funds to buy in blindly to avoid tracking errors
Meme stocker bros: $100B in share orders
30% of $75B offering is earmarked for individual retail investors. This effectively shifts late-stage, hyper-inflated valuation risk away from institutions and onto the public.
BlackRock $5B
Institutional investors admitted that when they bought into SpaceX privately, they were given high-level revenue figures but were denied a copy of the actual balance sheet—an unprecedented lack of transparency for a company raising tens of billions
University of Washington more than 10% of its $17B in assets
UNC about 10%
SpaceX will make $75B in proceeds
Saudi Aramco $26B; Alibaba $22B
Elon Musk’s Absolute Voting Tyranny (80% of voting power)
personal net worth has officially skyrocketed past $1.1T
SpaceX’s foundational scale was built on the back of the American public, securing over $20 billion in U.S. federal government contracts to fund its rocket development
Antonio Gracias: personally lent Musk $1M to keep him afloat; his PE firm Valor gave $76M
That $1M lifeline and early institutional backing from 2008 have compounded into what analysts are calling the most lucrative return on a personal favor in business history.
The Second-Largest Shareholder: Through various Valor entities, Gracias controls roughly 7.3% of SpaceX’s Class A stock (more than 500 million shares)
Gracias’s stake is officially worth anywhere from $91B to over $140B
This single corporate listing instantly catapults Gracias into the ranks of the world's 50 richest people.
The big party: combined valuation of $3.6T
Anthropic ($965B) filed confidentially on June 1
OpenAI ($1T) filed confidentially on June 8
"We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it's a complicated set of tradeoffs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best."
What does it all amount to? 4 horrible objectives:
Funding a Sci-Fi Passion Project with Public Cash
Becoming the Pentagon's Irreplaceable War Machine
Forget the folksy narrative that Starlink is just for connecting rural schools or isolated communities: SpaceX is systematically turning itself into the ultimate military contractor
Project Starshield: Those satellites are the foundation for a highly classified, militarized version of the network designed for government surveillance, secure communications, and real-time battlefield tracking.
Too Big to Regulate: By launching the vast majority of the world's payloads and controlling the dominant orbital communications network, SpaceX is making the U.S. military entirely dependent on its hardware. The ultimate point is to become so deeply embedded in national defense that the government can never afford to regulate, penalize, or dismantle Musk's empire
An Orbital Real Estate Land Grab
Building a Borderless, Lawless Empire
SpaceX is attempting to build a tech infrastructure that exists entirely outside the jurisdiction of Earth
Ultimately, SpaceX isn't trying to save humanity from a dying Earth; it's trying to ensure that whoever contro