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LorenDBtoday at 7:57 PM9 repliesview on HN

Investors clearly aren't familiar with rocket launches. SpaceX scrubbed their Starship launch last evening so they could fix an engine issue. SpaceX stock immediately crashed. Even worse, Rocket Lab, an entirely unaffiliated company, had its stock plummet after the SpaceX scrub.


Replies

manquertoday at 8:21 PM

RKLB has jumped 10x in last 18 months largely because of SpaceX hype , their business outlook hasn’t changed that much , so it is natural drops also come with SpaceX.

There is an enormous open short position in SpaceX now https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-15/short-sel...

The float is going to triple in several steps with 900M employee stocks getting added to 550M issued in the IPO.

The thesis that larger pool will depress prices even if all other things remain same is quite sound, just like a small float inflates the price .

These events are merely triggers / focal points as would the quarterly results next month and various unlocking dates .

the traders are savvy they are just looking at different things and using company news to focus the price actions on .

Valuations are not based on business models or financial performance for the highly visible public companies, that has always been the case since earliest days of the modern market .

it is just vibes or to put it differently a strong belief/faith discounting every risk . Without that faith TSLA won’t trade at 350 PE with middling growth no new products currently scheduled . SPCX at $2T+, even for an AI company a lot - it is larger than valuations of both market leaders combined while having <5% share/revenue .

Maybe the faith will prove justified or maybe not, either way the price moves by sentiment alone not any actual business logic

hangonhntoday at 7:59 PM

I wonder if some of that can be attributed to automated trading systems that interpreted the news related to SpaceX and performed sentiment analysis and then traded based on that.

Gystoday at 8:03 PM

> Investors clearly aren't familiar with rocket launches.

That is exactly what Musk was counting on. Reality is boring and no fun. People want promises, stars and dreams.

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reverius42today at 8:11 PM

Not sure why investors should be familiar with rocket launches when rockets are only representative of like 5% of the market value of SpaceX (per their S-1 filing to go public, 90%+ of their value comes from xAI/Grok).

SwellJoetoday at 8:15 PM

Investors are clearly not familiar with anything Musk does, because it's all wildly overvalued.

A dip because of a scrubbed launch is a blip on the radar compared to the catastrophically bad ideas Musk is promising to implement. Data centers in space? That's just lunacy. A ridiculous idea from a ridiculous man.

mattastoday at 8:16 PM

The fact investors think (thought) SpaceX is worth more than $2T is another example of how they aren't familiar with rocket launches.

sega_saitoday at 8:13 PM

SpaceX stock price has nothing to do with rockets. The majority of the supposed 'valuation' is associated with AI.

notahackertoday at 8:08 PM

tbf people familiar with how much of a non-event launches being scrubbed are could buy into the stock, if they didn't think it was still overvalued...

babypunchertoday at 8:15 PM

SpaceX stock has been tanking since its IPO, I don't think last night's scrubbed launch is the culprit.

Might have something to do with Musk making outlandish promises (AI datacenters in space) and the fact that most of the company's value is tied up in xAI, the shittiest AI provider.