Cathie Wood’s $10 Trillion SpaceX Fantasy
Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Debunking ARK’s Cathie Wood has become something of a perfunctory exercise at this point, yet one I feel compelled to continue for the good of the human race…and for “investors” whose frontal lobes may not be fully developed yet.
Critiquing her analysis always reminds me of a line from one of my favorite movies, Grandma’s Boy: “This is like if Mike Tyson fought an infant.”
And I’m no intellectual giant, trust me. That’s what makes the analogy so troubling.
While you were doing other things, Wood appears to have returned to the method of securities analysis that made her famous yesterday: take the most optimistic thing Elon Musk has ever said, multiply it by a gigantic number, pepper in between one and fifty batshit-insane assumptions, pray for a gamma squeeze to make it all make sense, then fire the whole thing out in 280 characters or less on Twitter, letting the word “if” do more heavy lifting than the elevator at Jerry Nadler’s apartment building.
Yesterday Wood, who by 2024 had destroyed approximately $14 billion in investor capital according to Morningstar, took to Twitter to opine on SpaceX. Her latest “analysis” goes something like this: “Each Starship launch could generate $1 billion in revenue. Elon is aiming for 10,000 flights per year, or $10 trillion in Starship revenues, by 2030. If SpaceX achieves this goal, its $1.75 trillion IPO will be considered, in hindsight, a deep value opportunity!”
Yeah, and if I set up a roadside Lemonade stand and sell 10 billion cups of lemonade next year for $1,000 each, I will have a $10 trillion business. The multiplication is not the difficult part. The difficult part attempting to make any of the assumptions make sense without first huffing paint for 3 hours and then having someone strike the part of your brain responsible for critical thinking with a tire iron repeatedly.
Keep in Wood’s target here is 2030…about 3 years and 3.5 months away. 4 years and 3.5 months if you want to give her the benefit of having the entire year to get this little shopping list of fantasies checked off.
Here’s what Cathie Wood wants done in less than 5 years:
10,000 Starship flights per year (roughly 27 launches every calendar day)
$1 billion in revenue per launch (roughly $27 billion in revenue per day)
Let’s start with 10,000 Starship flights per year. That works out to about 27 launches every single day, 365 days a year. SpaceX would be launching a Starship approximately once every 53 minutes, around the clock.
Think about the physical infrastructure required to do that…(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).