There is actually a real bull case for xAI (that I don't endorse), e.g. from people who think that chips & computer is the main determiner of model quality. xAI may plausibly soon have the biggest training apparatus of anyone.

I think talent is more important than compute, as I wrote in my Jan 2026 predictions that Anthropic would end up on top this year: https://futuresearch.ai/blog/forecasting-top-ai-lab-2026/

As I wrote in the piece, I'm extremely skeptical that xAI should be valued as if it is a frontier lab.

But as you say, going back to the xAI + SpaceX merger, analysts consistently seem to value it as if it is, so I predict the public will too, at IPO time.

Yeah, I might have stated this poorly. In the forecast it's just a question of expected value, I don't give almost any probability to "Starship is worthless".

My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.

Yeah, it's wild. But it's not like the P/E should be 30, what do you think would be fair?

That's the thing about SpaceX, some businesses are real businesses that can be modeled in normal ways, like the government launch contracts, and to some degree starlink.

Others, like ~all of xAI, and the starship stuff, are being valued completely independent of revenue. I predict the IPO investors will generally follow the analysis consensus today with those eye-popping numbers.