Here is something worth contemplating. This week, SpaceX priced the biggest IPO in history at a $1.77 trillion valuation. The same week, Morningstar put a number on the same company: $780 billion.
Less than half.
Both are looking at the identical filing.
Same revenue, same launch cadence, same Starlink growth, same xAI merger. They roughly agree on the value of the rockets and the satellites. They are a trillion dollars apart on everything else.
What founders should notice is where the disagreement lives.
It is not in the parts of the business you can measure. SpaceX did $18.7 billion in revenue last year and launched most of the mass that went to orbit from this planet. Nobody disputes that. The entire gap is the AI business that came in through the xAI deal, an asset that one of the two firms flatly admits it cannot value. Indeterminate, they called it.
So the most expensive question in the biggest IPO ever is one nobody can answer with a model. The price is being set by something else. By Musk's record. By a thin float engineered to spike on day one. By the gravitational pull of forced index buying. By a story about the largest market in human history.
That is the part worth pulling on.
Because somewhere in your own company, there is a number that the market, or your board, or your next investor is going to fill in with a story rather than a model.
The founders who do well are usually not the ones with the best fundamentals. They are the ones who understood which number would be decided by the narrative and got there first.
When a trillion dollars of value rests on an asset nobody can price, is the market valuing the business, or the storyteller?
Enjoy the ride + Plan accordingly.
-Marc A. Ross
Founder @ Brigadoon
Brigadoon | Know What's Next.
