The bond market’s assessment also jibes with SpaceX’s stock. It’s a profitless, non-dividend-paying, one-person-controlled, empire-building project trading at more than 100 times sales, about 30 times the valuation of the S&P 500 Index. That’s the very definition of a junk stock.
Original link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-07-02/spacex-is-junk-that-s-what-the-bond-market-says
The point of manned missions and colonies now is proof of concept for the expansion of human civilization to other worlds, but yes, that’s not a private for profit endeavor but a public interest one.
That said, the research and development done for the Apollo moon shots returned to the economy $14 for every one dollar spent, so it was absolutely a sound investment. Also, those patents were sold to the US government for a dollar each (at most), and so the technology gained like microcircuitry and memory foam, are public domain.
( RANT: The public domain, the creation of a robust one is – according to the Constitution of the United States – the very purpose of the whole temporary monopoly system that is the foundation of intellectual property law.)