Pod Insights Prof G Markets OpenAI’s Financials Leaked — The Losses Are Staggering About this episode Ed Elson is joined by Ed Zitron to discuss OpenAI’s leaked financials and how much money they are actually losing. Then, Nicolas Owens joins the show to unpack why he thinks SpaceX is overvalued. Finally, Ed explains why he thinks the markets have entered Crazy Town.
Ed Zitron is the author of the Where’s Your Ed At Newsletter, and the Better Offline Podcast. Nicolas Owens is an equity analyst for Morningstar.
Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel
Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter
Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram
Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack
Follow Scott on Instagram
Send us your questions or comments by emailing [email protected]
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 5,811 words · 16 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.
0:09 Speaker 01 I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it it wasn't.
0:17 Speaker 00 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
0:31 Speaker 02 Low energy, unfocused, foggy, you might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors. Great tasting hydration, no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade hydrates better than water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.
1:00 Speaker 03 Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey. I got you.
1:06 Speaker 04 Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.
1:10 Speaker 03 Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse. Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.
1:18 Speaker 05 There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty, only at Sephora.
1:25 Speaker 06 Hi, I.
1:27 Speaker 03 Let's get you a basket.
1:34 Speaker 07 Money markets met. If money is evil, then that building is hell.
1:44 Ed Elson? Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is June 17th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The S and P 500 and the Nasdaq declined as chip stocks sold off. Meanwhile, the Dow hit another all time high. Brent crude fell lower. The yield on 10 year Treasury slid ahead of the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision due this afternoon. On calcally, the odds that the Fed holds rates steady are at 99%. And finally, SpaceX stock popped another 15% early in the day. Before paring back most of those gains, it is now roughly as valuable as Amazon. More on that later.
2:25 Ed Elson? Okay, what else is happening? OpenAI's financials were just leaked and the numbers are wild. The company hit $13 billion in revenue last year, up more than 250% from 2024. But the number that has everyone talking is how much OpenAI lost last year. The answer, $39 billion. Meanwhile, the company has just filed to IPO and plans to go public later this year, which begs the obvious question, is this kind of spending sustainable? So to dig into these numbers, we are speaking with the man who actually broke this news,
3:04 Ed Elson? the guy who found the financials, and that is Ed Zitron, author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast. Ed, it's great to see you. Thank you for joining us once again. I know you've had a busy day because you literally just reported these financials. I'm not going to ask how you got your hands on them, but what I do know is it's been independently verified, audited by the Financial Times. These are real numbers. You found these numbers. Take us through them. What should we know about these financials?
3:41 Ed Zitron? So last year, OpenAI spent about $34 billion to make about $13.01, sorry, $07 billion. And they had about $22 billion in cash at the end of the year, lost about $21 billion. That $38, $39 billion number is what I would describe as gap voodoo. There is some very strange stuff, and I'll be going into this in future episodes, going on in the balance sheet and everything with this company. They turned from a nonprofit to a for-profit, though they've remained profitless, last year, which means that they have, their net loss is quite strange, it's like $38.5 billion. But the number I like to come back to is they lost $21 billion from operations. And they spent astronomical amounts on sales and marketing.
4:26 Ed Zitron? They spent $7.5 billion on cost of revenue, $19.18 billion in R and D. But that sales and marketing cost, that $5.73 billion is one I really like to hammer on because what?
4:40 Ed Zitron? Like, it's just like, it's just like, excuse me. Well, how much did you spend? Because the thing is here, there could be, I think that there's a potential that that could be partly passed through to Microsoft with revenue share. I truly don't know. This is just me guessing. But nevertheless, that's an extreme cost. But another thing to note is eight hundred and sixty seven million dollars. So about six point six percent of OpenAI's revenue last year came from SoftBank.
5:06 Ed Elson? Hmm.
5:06 Ed Zitron? Now, I truly don't know what that's for. They have a thing called Crystal Intelligence. I'm not kidding. It's actually called that, spelled the same way too. And but that's a very alarming number because that's a huge amount of revenue from one partner that I don't think was probably causing their COGS to spike at all. That's a large amount of their revenue coming from a single partner that is more than likely just, I mean, I can assume not like Crystal Intelligence is not launched anywhere. It's only, it took a few months to even get out the door. It was announced in February twenty twenty five, took until the end of the year to hear anything about it, but they still paid nearly a billion dollars. It's very concerning and it also suggests that OpenAI's growth is not quite as fast as we believe too.
5:51 Ed Elson? Just going back to the the losses here, because this seems to be the most important thing for investors to understand is how much money are they burning really? Uh, the the number that I saw, the net loss that was reported by you and uh, by the Financial Times independently, I know you guys looked at the same document, but there are a lot of numbers on there and it gets a little confusing. The number I saw was thirty eight and a half billion dollars in net losses, up eightfold year over year. Now, there were, there was some nuance in here, um, because as you pointed out, when you take into account these other factors like interest income and interest expense, the number goes up to sixty billion dollars and you pointed out that they lowered that number by taking that stuff out.
6:34 Ed Elson? But then the Financial Times also spoke with someone, quote, familiar with the matter. And this person who was familiar with the matter said that the reason that that number was so high was because as OpenAI's valuation went up, they had to create this $30 billion charge in investor rights, which I kind of understood to be stock-based compensation. And so their argument was, when you adjust for that, the real net loss is closer to $8 billion in losses. All of this is obviously very confusing, and I don't fully understand it. So I just want to get your view on how do we make sense of this? Because there's a lot of numbers, a lot of nuance, and I'm not fully sure what it all means.
7:15 Ed Zitron? So I did not speak to the person familiar with the matter. I do not know who they are. I think that's wank. I'm just gonna be completely honest. You spend $34 billion to make $13.07 billion. You didn't just lose $8 billion. Stop. Like, when I read that comment, I did a big chuckle, and I knew all the boosters would all get hot and heavily be like, aha, the proof we need. The numbers to look at are the actual costs and the actual revenues. These companies, OpenAI in particular, have lived high on the hog, spreading weirdness around numbers. The numbers to focus on are how much they're burning. $1.57 billion
7:56 Ed Zitron? just on general administrative, just on people. And I don't even think that that includes all the people. It doesn't. I don't have any other knowledges to this, because I don't have the definitions of these terms from within the sheets. But the thing is here is this is a company with spiraling costs, dramatic costs, way beyond what we thought. There is spending, and they put research and development in there, and they market that, I believe, personal belief here, because they want people to think that this is a temporary situation. This is something that will go away, that when there's enough R and D, they can stop. No, no, no. R and D number going up very high. Everything is increasing, every cost is increasing. And I think it's just a kind of a frightening
8:41 Ed Zitron? sign of what the innards of these companies look like. And think about it like this. OpenAI has already said as part of the Musk trial that they're going to spend $50 billion on compute this year alone in 2026. Their losses are going to be astronomical. I don't have any privy knowledge to the 2026 numbers, but. Based on these, they could be burning eighty, ninety billion dollars. It's genuinely, it's genuinely horrifying. I'm glad that I got to tell this story before the S one is filed, because I think people need to see what, what the innards of this company look like before they get a chance to massage them.
9:17 Ed Elson? Yeah, I, I agree that they're actually, one of the craziest numbers was the sales and marketing number up to five point seven billion dollars. It jumped four hundred and eighteen percent in one year. That's forty four percent of total revenue. And we just look for, for context, when you look at Facebook's marketing, it peaked at twenty eight percent of revenue in two thousand and eight. Uh, Google's hit eleven percent in two thousand and three. OpenAI is at forty four percent. So they're spending astronomical amounts of money not to build AI, but to sell AI, to make it profitable. And that does seem to be a real problem. I mean, just looking at the SpaceX IPO as a comparison point.
10:01 Ed Elson? When, when the S one came out, I wrote about it and a lot of people talked about it. I'm sure you talked about it as well. The, the numbers did not look great from a profitability perspective. We called it a money furnace, cash incinerator, et cetera. Because that's what was happening and continues to happen. The company is losing astronomical amounts of money, building mostly AI, also rockets, but AI is the real money loser. And yet the stock is flying right now. It's as valuable as Amazon currently. So I guess I'd be interested to hear what you think will happen when the S one finally does come out for OpenAI.
10:41 Ed Elson? Maybe these numbers aren't concerning to people, or, or maybe they will be. I'd be interested to hear your views.
10:49 Ed Zitron? If OpenAI had SpaceX's losses, they'd be so happy. But then again, SpaceX doesn't have OpenAI's revenues. So who knows? I think the, the reason SpaceX has flown in the way it has is because of the Musk reality distortion field and his ability to play Goldman and JP Morgan against each other, both of them. Everyone, everyone there should be ashamed of themselves for pumping this for what they're just like, oh, AI revenue will increase three hundred X in four years. Putting all that aside, these are fundamentally different companies. Even though SpaceX has its horrible burning AI element, it still has Starlink, it still has the rocket ships. And it also has the social network, but I don't know if I'd say that was a plus.
11:30 Ed Zitron? It still has a functioning business. OpenAI has ChatGPT and API. That's it. Like they have, they can dance around being like, oh, we got Jony Ive's nonsense. Oh, we got like a consumer device or we got, we're going to do an everything app. But they're just dancing around the fact that they have one product. They have one product with a few offshoots. They don't have ways of investing more money to make money. You mentioned profitability earlier. I don't think that's possible. I don't like their costs are so severe that I don't think profitability is actually possible for any AI lab. I think that Anthropic is going to look similarly horrible.
12:11 Ed Zitron? I think that the markets believe for some reason that things won't look this bad. I've been speaking to people all day about this and everyone's saying, wow, I didn't know it would be that bad. And I genuinely, I, I got a laugh a bit. It's like, did people think I was kidding? Do people think I was, I was chuckling to like, oh, I just, I guess they were bad. No, of course they were this bad. So I don't think that OpenAI and Anthropic have the nuance and also the aggressive bully mentality of Musk, though I really deeply dislike, to be clear, to do an IPO with the amount of bullshit that will be necessary to sell this dog. I don't know how, because remember in the S1, they're also going to have to do growth trajectory.
12:56 Ed Zitron? They're going to have to say what they could grow into. I think it's, I think it's going to be difficult to float. I, they could theoretically, but I don't, considering how SpaceX is done, I think they have a higher chance than none. But at the same time, their SpaceX's numbers were bad. These numbers are terrifying. These are scary numbers. And watching the cope Olympics on Twitter, there's people like, well, actually it's okay. You saw that quote. You saw the quote that said eight billion. It's okay. They didn't actually spend thirty four billion. He spent eight billion dollars. It's okay. Nothing bad happened at all. Nothing weird. It's all very silly because this is a company that spent thirty four billion dollars to make thirteen point oh seven billion dollars.
13:41 Ed Zitron? And also eight hundred and sixty seven million of that was what looks like given to them by SoftBank. And it's, that is not a stable or thriving business. This is a business that is just consuming capital at an alarming rate with no sign of stopping. They just raised a hundred and twenty two billion dollars at the beginning of this year. I don't think they're doing that because they're going to get profitable.
14:04 Ed Elson? It does seem as though when this company goes out, when it goes public and it appears that it is going to go public. They have filed plans to go public in the fall. The valuation will be similar to SpaceX, almost entirely dependent on the CEO's ability to tell a compelling story that enough people buy into and believe. Elon is someone that you could arguably bet good money on doing that because he has a proven track record of being an incredible storyteller, specifically to the markets on what his companies will achieve. Sam Altman, I'm not sure I back him to tell a compelling story or to capture the imaginations of investors in the markets. Because it's clear that the numbers aren't going to do it for him.
14:49 Ed Zitron? Also, the other day, I just, I had to go and check on this while we're talking. Here's the reason I don't think, Seth, I agree with you fully. I don't think Sam Altman's got the head for this because when his customers started complaining about the cost, he said in a panel, yeah, AI costs are a huge issue now. You don't say that, Sammy. You don't. That's not, that's not what investors want to hear. They, you said, you make some crap up about how like we're doing cost adjustments, but people are really excited to see what they can do with AI. You don't go, yeah, that's a huge problem.
15:23 Ed Zitron? What's he going to do on the road show? They're going to be like, yeah, you keep losing money. Yeah, you know, you've got to lose money to lose money.
15:30 Ed Elson? Yeah, it's certainly very concerning. Well, we're going to wrap this up, but Ed Zitron, we always appreciate it. It's amazing that you got your hands on this. It really is so important in these companies, the size and the valuation and the sense in which they are becoming in a lot of ways systemic to this market and to expectations of this market is so important. And now we've finally gotten some transparency into what's really going on here. So we appreciate it. Ed Zitron is the author of the Where's Your Ed at newsletter, also the host of the Better Offline Podcast. Ed, appreciate your time.
16:05 Ed Zitron? Thanks for having me.
16:07 Ed Elson? After the break, SpaceX stock keeps going up. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, Simply Put, at simplyput.profgmedia.com.
16:26 Speaker 00 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
16:36 Speaker 01 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
16:43 Speaker 00 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
16:58 Speaker 10 Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Whether it's hot yoga, over 100-degree weather, or too much sun. Gator Light, with a specialized blend of five electrolytes, was scientifically designed to help move fluids into the body faster for rapid rehydration. Shop now at retailers nationwide. Gator Light: Hydrates Faster Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.
17:26 Speaker 03 Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey? I got you.
17:33 Speaker 04 Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.
17:36 Speaker 03 Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse? Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.
17:44 Speaker 05 There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty, only at Sephora.
17:51 Speaker 06 Hi, I... Let's get you a basket.
18:01 Ed Elson? We're back with Prof G Markets. In its third day of trading, SpaceX became the fifth most valuable company in the world tied with Amazon. The stock popped more than 15% early in the day to reach that milestone and briefly eclipsed Microsoft too. That rally followed an announcement from SpaceX that it is acquiring AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion. The stock gave up most of those gains through the day, closing up just 5%. Still, shares have rallied 48% from their IPO price on Friday. So clearly, there is still a lot of excitement around this company. So we wanted to talk to someone who has actually run the numbers and
18:45 Ed Elson? attempted to value this stock. So joining us to discuss SpaceX, we are speaking with Nicolas Owens, Equity Analyst for Morningstar. Nicholas, thank you for joining us. You are someone who has actually done a discounted cash flow analysis of this company. You valued the company, you wrote about it, and your number that you reached was $780 billion, which is, I mean, we compare it to the current valuation, $2.6 trillion. It is notably a lot lower. Take us through how you got to that number.
19:25 Speaker 11 The headline number that you just mentioned is the weighted average of three scenarios. And the way we valued SpaceX was in three parts, essentially, the rocket piece, Starlink, and the AI piece, which is itself kind of a set of moving parts. I would argue that the rocket and Starlink is more straightforward. It's a more mature part of the business. And in most of our scenarios, they're worth, say, $611 billion.
19:56 Speaker 11 In terms of enterprise value, some forty dollars a share, let's say.
20:01 Speaker 11 The AI, we, we think there's a lot of riding on some unproven outcomes. And I'm not really talking about the science or engineering behind data centers in space, though there's some debate about that. It's really the financial benefit of having a data center in space. Is there some kind of operating cost advantage versus a terrestrial data center? We modeled this business primarily as an infrastructure play. So renting out computing capacity, the way they've started to do with Anthropic and Google. You know, if Grok takes off, then we, we would say that we're sort of indifferent between them renting out the capacity and using it for, for lots of Grok jobs and then monetizing that some other way.
20:46 Speaker 11 We would assume there's some market rate for that, and that's how we modeled it. And so the, the difference between our valuation and the market price really has to do with how probable do you believe it is going to be that both the Starship rocket is highly reusable, like in hours or days, and that data centers in space are, will be a, call it a compelling bargain in terms of their operating costs versus terrestrial. Both of those might be true, but we think there's only about a seven percent probability that they will both be true at the same time. And that results in a much higher valuation that's closer to the market price here. And so I think that the market, you know, investors are essentially saying they believe
21:29 Speaker 11 these will both be true for sure, but we don't.
21:32 Ed Elson? This is the thing that I think is really important, which is that your valuation is weighing multiple probabilities at the same time, and it isn't ruling out what you describe as the moonshot scenario, which I think is an accurate portrayal of some of these businesses, orbital data centers, down the line civilizations and cities on Mars. I mean, how do you even value that? But the point being, you've actually taken all of that into account, weighed up the probability, and you've landed at a number that is less than half what the company is currently trading at.
22:11 Ed Elson? And I think that that is striking. I want to get to your reactions to how the stock is trading in a moment, but I want to stay on your valuation for a moment longer. You also said, you said, quote, "We value SpaceX at $780 billion with a Morningstar economic moat rating of narrow." I've seen a lot of people pushing back criticizing the moat rating. A lot of people would say this is an extremely wide moat. They're building rockets. Not many people can do that. Take us through why you landed on that.
22:45 Speaker 11 I'm really glad to have the methodology behind me, so to speak. At Morningstar, we had quite a good discussion about this a couple of weeks ago. And I will say this, the SpaceX business that I, as the aerospace and defense analyst, was planning to cover until February, has almost all of the characteristics of a wide moat business. A very, very prodigious cost advantage, both through the R and D and how they do it, and the economies of scale. They've just done it more than anyone else. And so the satellite business and the rocket launch business kind of reinforce each other in terms of them just marching down this
23:26 Speaker 11 cost curve. They're a decade ahead of anybody else and will continue to do so, assuming Starship continues to add, you know, the bigger loading bay of Starship means that you can put more stuff in it. So your cost to launch a kilogram of stuff goes down. You're sort of just dividing by a bigger denominator, and that's amazing. The company gets a narrow moat rating from us because of the AI piece, which is, I would say, indeterminate at best in terms of what its moat would be. And they're investing very aggressively in that business. So you're taking these returns on capital that are evident, you know, from the Starlink and Rockets business, and you're saying, I'm going to write a $60 billion check to go get cursor,
24:11 Speaker 11 I'm, you know, do similar size of investments to build data centers in space. And while I think there could be moats in AI, we don't see evidence of them here. So, you know, Grok is not one of the leading models. I do think there's a pathway in this, let's say, moonshot scenario. And even in what we call the minimum viable product scenario, where they can extend some of that cost advantage into data centers in space. If they can, then that would be, let's say, Modi. But it's, it's, it's too soon to say, frankly.
24:49 Ed Elson? Yeah, this is part of the problem with this stock, which is it was a space company. And then a couple of months ago, they turned it into something else by buying XAI and then saying that actually it's an AI company. Or that that is the $28 trillion or $26 trillion opportunity, according to the S1. That was the total addressable market with AI. So, I mean, I appreciate you clarifying that. It's like, there are different businesses that we're evaluating here. The space business might have a wide moat, but this is no longer a space business, apparently, because that's not what they're pitching and that's supposedly not what the valuation
25:33 Ed Elson? is predicated on. Let's go to the stock price. Do you agree with that?
25:38 Speaker 11 Yeah, and I think segueing to the stock price is appropriate because I think the, let's call it, packaging of this company as an AI business is a very rational way to tap into investor appetite for AI.
25:52 Ed Elson? Right. So, the IPO price was 135. We're looking at $200 a share at the moment. That does not make much sense to me. I assume it doesn't make much sense to you. But when I think about reasons why that might be the case, the first thing that jumps out to me is that only 4% of the shares are available to the public. The float is incredibly small, which to me means this has high potential to become a meme stock and seems to look like it already is a meme stock. Is that the explanation?
26:28 Speaker 11 I think so. I've thought about it in terms of supply and demand, as you point out, small float. And then you have this additional, let's say, the market is looking forward to sort of, let's call it structural demand from passive funds, ETFs and others that track a handful of indexes.
26:50 Speaker 11 And so our moonshot scenario, if you dial the probabilities to 100%, right now, it would be $169 a share. So, and there's hundreds of billions of dollars of potential revenue in there. We are modeling a scenario in which they become a major player in gigawatts of compute in space, et cetera, sort of giving them the benefit of all that doubt. We get to 169, the rating would probably be close to the same at these market prices. And that's just because I think investors are either pricing in further options like a city on Mars,
27:35 Speaker 11 which we don't ascribe a positive value to, it's sort of a wash. If you're investing more in these shares, you're paying an option to see if that's going to work. And we would say that those types of other projects are more likely than not to not work out, which maybe puts me in the minority there. But in the longer term, starting at the earnings announcement that I anticipate at the end of July or early August, big chunks of shares will come online from the lockups from insiders. And so I think that will be, you'll have a Nasdaq rebalance before then, but then you have a decent chunk of stock coming online from insiders. And I think that will be the next real test of supply and demand.
28:20 Ed Elson? How concerned would you be, do you think we should be about those lockups? To me, it seems like that's going to put enormous pressure on the stock. And if you're holding this stock at $200, I mean, it seems like that should be top of mind. I mean, what kind of impact do you think those lockup expirations will actually have on this?
28:41 Speaker 11 I wouldn't be able to predict, you know, a stock chart, so to speak, but it's tens of billions of dollars. It's more than the IPO flow will come online there in that first big chunk after Q2 earnings. And the indexes that are buying, as the float increases, you know, they, most of them do this float adjustment to their weighting. So their, their demand will, will kind of slowly scale up, but I don't think it will, will offset that, that chunk, you know, that's likely to come online. And the perspective here is who's selling? These are investors who've, who've owned this stock as a private company for more than a decade in some cases. They don't care if it's
29:25 Speaker 11 160, 170 or $200. Their cost basis is nothing, you know? And so that's just, and the price, the price is set by the marginal seller. That's what I keep saying.
29:37 Ed Elson? Yeah, 100%. Final thing here, SpaceX just announced a $60 billion deal for Cursor, which is this AI coding startup. They had announced that there was an option to buy previously, so we're getting a little bit of deja vu, but it's now happened and they will be paying in stock, which I'll give credit to SpaceX, great move, highly inflated stock price at this point. That's really, that's really effective currency in the M and A market. Does that acquisition change any of the math on your valuation? Does it change your perspective at all or not?
30:12 Speaker 11 It's sort of a, mostly a wash. We actually lowered our fair value, that probability weighted to 62 from 63 today. The, the, the cost of the, but, but it actually, it raises the moonshot value. So I, I think it, it, the whole idea of Cursor, my understanding was it was to bring on these people who are able to be able to make Grok, you know, learn better and, and be more, more useful for coding type applications. So I give them benefit of the doubt and say, let's, let's make that true. And, and it was originally structured as an option to buy if that, let's say, likely or proven. Moves out. I think they kind of just jumped to the finish and said, let's do it.
30:56 Speaker 11 The so kind of the purchase price, the outlay and the dilution of 60 billion of equity is offset by an adjustment I made in the forecast of, let's say, greater enterprise type revenue from that audience.
31:11 Ed Elson? Nicolas Owens, Equity Analyst for Morningstar. This will be very interesting to see how the stock trades over the next few weeks and months. And I'm sure we'll be having plenty more conversations. Thank you for joining us.
31:22 Speaker 11 Thank you.
31:24 Ed Elson? It's official. The stock market has entered crazy town. SpaceX is now as valuable as Amazon despite generating less revenue than Macy's. And all over Wall Street, I'm hearing things about how the fundamentals don't matter anymore with SpaceX because this is a once in a generation company that will save humanity, exactly the kind of rhetoric that has fueled previous stock market bubbles. But it isn't just SpaceX. The entire stock market is now reaching dot com levels of euphoria. The Shiller P E ratio, which is the cyclically adjusted price to earnings ratio of the S and P 500 is now up to 42
32:07 Ed Elson? times earnings. That is the second highest reading ever. The only time it was higher was in, you guessed it, 1999, when it hit 44 times earnings, which is of course not that much higher. Now, you might remember last fall, there was a lot of talk about a stock market bubble. And you might remember what we said about it. We acknowledged that, yes, the market was frothy, but it wasn't anywhere close to dot com levels of frothiness. And for that reason, we were hesitant to call it a bubble. Well, that argument can no longer really be made. We are now almost exactly in dot
32:47 Ed Elson? com level territory. That's not an opinion. That is just a fact. Now, does that mean every stock is about to crash? No. In fact, I'd argue there are plenty of stocks that look relatively cheap right now. Microsoft would be one of them, in my view. So would Meta. But it does mean that in certain areas of the market, we are certainly due for a correction. Ground zero would be space, or more specifically SpaceX. But for now, spirits are high and FOMO is very strong. Investors have gone crazy plenty of times before, and it does appear they are going crazy again. AI euphoria has officially arrived.
33:33 Ed Elson? Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalane, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Noddonahue, and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake MacPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.
34:00 Speaker 12 Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
34:07 Speaker 13 Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-CONTACTS. Oh my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order.
34:28 Speaker 12 1-800-CONTACTS.
34:30 Speaker 14 They're running a cover two defense, but you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go-to restaurants, or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
35:00 Speaker 15 Ahora en McDonald's te puedes llevar dos pares de carne, salsa especial y papitas medianas y una bebida por ocho dólares. Así que llévate una Big Mac Extra Value Meal. Solo en McDonald's. Precios y participación pueden variar. El precio de la promoción puede ser más bajo que el precio del mío.
Previous The Iran “Deal” Isn’t What It Seems Next Snap’s “Crucible Moment” Flops On Wall Street Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
