Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: SpaceX Investors Can’t Complain (Correct)

SpaceX: TAM

“We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (‘TAM’) in human history,” says the prospectus for SpaceX’s initial public offering, and, duh, of course. Every other company in human history has had essentially the same business model, which is “we will sell goods or services to people on Earth for money.” The upper bound on every company’s TAM has been something like the number of people on Earth times the amount of money they can spend, the gross domestic product of the Earth.

SpaceX has much higher ambitions. “Our mission,” it says, “is to build the ...