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 controls Earth's future has to pay rent to Elon Musk

Iran threatens Elon Musk’s companies in Middle East: Iranian state media

All of Elon Musk’s companies in the Middle East are military targets for Iran as it retaliates against the U.S., Iranian state media outlet Fars reported.

The targets include a regional Starlink ground station, according to Fars.

Sen. Warren calls on SEC to delay SpaceX IPO, flagging concerns about valuation and governance

The letter to the heads of the Nasdaq, S&P Dow Jones Indices, FTSE Russell and Morningstar Indexes sent on Thursday asked the companies whether they had made or considered rule changes based on lobbying from Elon Musk, other SpaceX officials or officials from OpenAI or Anthropic, and asked for any communications between the companies and the indexes

LSEG, which owns the FTSE Russell, and Nasdaq declined to comment. Morningstar did not respond to a request from CNBC for comment.

S&P Dow Jones Indices didn’t comment on the letter, but the company noted it had decided not to change its rules regarding indexes: “S&P DJI determined that exceptions to these requirements should not be granted solely based on market capitalization,” it said in a statement to CNBC. “The decision not to adopt the proposed exceptions preserves core index principles by maintaining consistent application of these key requirements.”

Democrats ask Gol...