I'm not sure it's holy, but there certainly was a trinity in the SpaceX IPO last week.

SpaceX went public at $1.77T, and market enthusiasm in the first day of trading pushed the value to over $2T.

There are three segments to SpaceX: Starlink, rockets, and xAI. The S-1 investor prospectus described them as aligned in a quest “to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.”

Yes, just like WeWork’s 2019 S-1 mission to “elevate the world's consciousness.” That one became a punchline, because underneath the poetry was nothing more than a landlord losing $2B a year.

In Musk’s case, there’s a fundamental success, Starlink, to which he attached two other money-losing businesses, wrapped the whole thing in cosmic language, and sold the package at 94 times revenue.

It’s hard to overstate just how absurd that price is. 94x revenue is nearly 50 times more expensive than the historical average in the S&P 500. It’s over 10 times more expensive than Apple—and that’s a company that made $112B in profit last year, compared to SpaceX’s $5B loss.

That’s right: the most profitable company on earth is valued at a tenth of SpaceX's revenue multiple. And all of that is before SpaceX stock went up about 20% in the first day of trading.

I have no idea whether the SpaceX dream will grow into those expectations. Musk is notorious for selling big ideas that, at the very least, take much, much longer to arrive than he claims. A decade ago he founded the Boring Company, promising vast underground networks that would end city traffic by whisking autonomous pods through tunnels at high speed. A 2022 round valued the company at $5.7B, and so far all the company has delivered is a single loop under the Las Vegas Convention Center, where human-driven Teslas carry passengers at city speed.

In other words, investors bought the end of traffic and received a short tunnel filled with cars.

But you don’t have to want Kim Kardashian's life to admire how completely she proved that attention is a business model. The goal here isn't to adulate. It's to take the SpaceX IPO as an object lesson in the power of narrative.

Stories shape capital flows. How did Musk weave together the gossamer threads of SpaceX’s three pieces to support a $1.77 trillion price tag?

The key was how he layered two visions on top of one real and profitable business, Starlink. That proof let investors extend belief to the overall dream and made the total way more valuable than the sum of its parts.

You likely won’t merge three companies before your Series A, just as you probably won’t make your company worth more than Saudi Aramco. But you can present a related and miniature version of what Musk did. I've been recommending the Moment to Dream slide in pitch decks for years: after you present your core business, you describe the bigger markets you'll go after once you've won your first one.

Conventional: "We have two valuable drug candidates." Better: "We have two cleared assets in oncology. The same engine that produced them is a platform aimed at a dozen more diseases."

Conventional: "Our sensor is the future of industrial inspection." Better: "Three Fortune 500 plants run our sensor today. That same hardware is our wedge into predictive maintenance, a market ten times the size."

Plant your feet on something real, then point at the horizon. The proof earns you the right to dream out loud, and the dream is what carbonates your valuation.

Of course, there’s a limit to any comparison between early-stage startups and the assembly of Musk’s cosmic cream cake. He had strong financial incentives to fold in the erstwhile Twitter and his Grok AI, both expensive money losers, into SpaceX before going public. So his cosmic framing about how AI accelerates a trip to Mars didn't lead the strategy, it was reverse-engineered.

But that’s almost as valuable a lesson about narrative: you make the story fit the facts. If Jesus’ body hadn’t disappeared after his death, would Christianity have come up with the story about his rising from the dead?

A few years ago I wrote that all startups are BS, which I meant it as a compliment. The BS comes first. Then you go build the company that makes it true.

So open your own deck and find your moment to dream. Just remember, the first trillion is the hardest.

Let’s build,

Otto