MORE OR LESS - The Stories We Buy (and Sell).
Given the headlines of last week…. The story was about story. SpaceX has one… the S1 full of TAM and pictures was a success — people want to buy the ‘future’ / techno-optimism (and a bit of 140 characters along with them flying cars)… Anthropic has fully swiped the story of ‘AI so good it is dangerous’… but where does this leave OpenAI (the original AI-danger story, that softened itself for popular consumption … is the answer ‘SIZE MATTERS’… ? Remember when it was ‘making the world more open and connected’ (that was a banger btw.)
THE REAL SPACEX IPO LESSON: WE LIVE IN A CAPITALIST MULTIVERSE OF VALUE
DCF is no longer the only globally scalable story of value. The internet lets minority belief systems create trillion-dollar markets
For the last few decades, the dominant global story of value has been the DCF.
Things are worth the present value of future cash flows. Revenue becomes margin. Margin becomes profit. Profit becomes dividends or buybacks. That is the cleanest, most liquid, most institutionally acceptable story of capitalism. It is still the reserve currency of valuation because the buyer base for that story is almost infinitely deep.
But it is not the only story of value.
The real lesson of the SpaceX IPO is that alternative stories of value can now scale to previously impossible size.
Not just GME scale. Not just crypto scale. Trillion-dollar public-market scale.
The single mass-market story of value is dying the same way mass media died. There is no longer one narrative everyone has to accept. There are capital subcultures, belief networks, and cults of value that can coordinate through the internet, pool conviction, and support enormous valuations around stories that do not reduce neatly to near-term cash flow.
SpaceX is the cleanest version of this yet because there is a futuristic picture to believe in (in fact they put several of those pictures in their S1, leterally, and hilariously)... Inclusive of a $23T TAM which was so ridiculous that it was brilliant brilliant marketing.
And in a world where outcomes feel distributed between zero and infinity, many investors are no longer trying to “beat the market.” They are trying not to miss the swerve... especially with retail fears of the permanent underclass.
That all matters.
People’s love of the old capitalist story is low. They do not feel ownership through dividends. Taxes mean they rarely experience profits directly. “Good assets at reasonable prices” feel psychologically insufficient when the real fear is missing the one thing that bends the curve between normal life and utopia.
So yes, if we are going to make someone a trillionaire, people like the aesthetics of it being the rocket guy. I certainly do.
But the deeper lesson is this: you no longer need to convince everyone. You need a large enough and growing core of people who love the story, want to own the story, and believe the story might swerve to infinity...
Bitcoin taught this lesson first. Most well-adjusted smart people said, “No profits, no value,” and missed that internet-native belief itself could become a capital formation mechanism. GME was another scoffing moment. SpaceX is the latest — and maybe the most important — because it feels like the anti-cult narrative is capitulating.
People are starting to accept that mono-line capitalism, with one universally accepted story of value, is over.
Will this end well? Who knows. History says probably not. But the post-internet world is genuinely different from the pre-internet world. Inequality, high taxes, fractionalization, regionalization, de-globalization, and internet coordination all point in the same direction: not all capital is playing the same game anymore.
Fukuyama was famously wrong about the “end of history” if that meant convergence on liberal democracy, global markets, and 1990s capitalism as the final operating system.
But maybe we are reaching the end of modern capitalist history in a different sense.
The age of one liquid, universal, DCF-based story of value is ending.
The next era is a capitalist multiverse: people holding assets not only for cash flows, but for identity, story, optionality, sovereignty, and the chance — however irrational it may look from the outside — of participating in the swerve to infinity.
.... Or we will look back in a few years and this email will look even dumber than what Francis said in the 1990s - Time will tell!
OTHER HOT TAKES OF LAST WEEK
Best,
Sam
P.S. “One does not book through Opentable”
P.P.S. The best of instagram basketball, soccer, kids, Tswift, SpaceX… and this will probably lose me a few subscribers.