Are you investing, or already sitting at the gambling table?
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
Recently a friend asked me:
"What do you think of the SpaceX IPO? Should I buy?"
Honestly, I'm not a stock expert or a professional analyst, so I won't pretend to know and tell him straight out whether to buy or not.
But I have been watching this closely.
If the reports are right, SpaceX is targeting a valuation of around US$1.75 trillion in this IPO and plans to raise around US$75 billion.
That number alone is already wild.
What's even wilder is that this year it isn't just SpaceX. Anthropic has confidentially filed for an IPO, OpenAI is preparing one too, and the market keeps discussing whether it could reach a trillion-dollar valuation.
Then look at Google.
Google, one of the best money-making companies in the world with enormous cash flow, is now also raising more than US$80 billion by issuing shares to support its AI infrastructure.
AI is a money-devouring beast
This is worth thinking about.
Because it shows AI isn't an ordinary software upgrade.
AI is a beast that devours money.
It needs chips, data centres, electricity, talent, model training, servers, cloud, an application layer, an entire infrastructure rebuilt from scratch.
That's why, over the past few years, money has kept flowing to AI-related companies like Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Micron and Broadcom. Now, as mega IPOs like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI arrive, market money will be pulled in even more tightly.
The problem is that money in the market isn't created out of thin air.
If a fund wants to buy SpaceX, OpenAI or Anthropic, it will very likely have to sell something somewhere else.
So what really worries me isn't necessarily what happens to SpaceX after listing. It's that other companies that also talk about AI, but aren't at the core, may face bigger swings.
Because before, people had no choice and could only buy a basket of AI concept stocks.
But if "genuine future assets" like OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX all list, a lot of money will naturally be reranked.
Value investing, or faith?
So can you buy SpaceX?
I think the question has to be split in two.
If you look at it through traditional value investing, it's definitely hard to buy.
The valuation is too high, and profits haven't been fully proven. It's very hard to use traditional tools like P/E, cash flow and dividends to arrive at a comfortable price.
But if you look at it through "faith", it's another matter.
What SpaceX sells isn't how much it earns this year.
It sells space, satellite networks, Starlink, future infrastructure, and the imagination that Elon Musk himself brings.
What OpenAI sells isn't today's profit either.
It sells the possibility of a future AI operating system.
Anthropic sells enterprise AI, coding agents, AI safety and enterprise trust.
Much of the time, these companies' valuations aren't supported by current financials, but by the market's belief that they will define the world of the next ten or twenty years.
So would I buy?
If it were me, I wouldn't make it a core investment.
But if you truly believe in the direction, putting in a bit of money you can afford to lose is understandable to me.
It's more like buying a ticket to the future, not value investing in the traditional sense.
The worst case is when people are clearly buying faith but think they're doing value investing.
These are two different things.
One you can calculate. The other you choose to believe.
So my answer to my friend was roughly:
I don't know whether SpaceX is worth buying.
But I do know this round of AI and future-infrastructure IPOs will keep concentrating market money into a handful of super companies.
The strong will get stronger, second-tier concept stocks will swing more, and the market will look more and more like a game of faith and liquidity.
In the end it reminded me of a feeling from the film God of Gamblers.
As long as you have three million, anyone can enter the charity gambling championship.
The question isn't whether you can get in.
The question is whether you know you're investing, or whether you're already sitting at the gambling table.