As part of my day job I have to read a lot of market takes, and the SpaceX IPO was the topic of the week. It's the largest IPO ever to hit the market, and it's also a highly unprofitable company. 

Much of the analysis can be summarized as such:

[bull case as outlined by ppl like Chamath Palihapitiya](https://substack.com/home/post/p-201616235) emphasize the huge total addressable market size through things like starlink that will provide worldwide connectivity, earth-orbiting solar panels that produce abundant solar energy, and rare-earth mining on asteroids. these are extremely operationally difficult but the potential payoff justifies the cost (and the current unprofitability). 

bear case as outlined by too many people to count is that most of the shares are locked up by insiders ie they can sell and dump onto the public market while making off with their money, 95x price/sales ratio which is about thirty times higher than rest of tech industry (shows how overvalued the company is), and the historical tendency for companies that IPO unprofitably to trade below their IPO price after three years.

all of this echoes the concept of unproductive expenditure as outlined in the Bataille essay ["Notion of Expenditure" (1933)](https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/notion-of-expenditure-bataille-1933-1.pdf) where "In trying to maintain sterility in regard to expenditure, in conformity with a reasoning that balances accounts, bourgeois society has only managed to develop a universal meanness." 

basically the bourgeois (private investors holding SpaceX shares in this instance) tries to cover this unproductive expenditure with a notion of balanced accounts, hence the Chamath line-of-reasoning that this all actually makes sense bc it will eventually recoup all the losses with vast vast wealth. The SpaceX prospectus also pays heed to the fictional balance of accounts by stating its intentions to "harness the Sun to power a truth-seeking artificial intelligence" a goal that is grandiose enough to sound productively commensurate to the loss of capital it is burning up.

according to Bataille societies have "an interest in considerable losses, in catastrophes that... provoke tumultuous depressions, crises of dread and, in the final analysis, a certain orgiastic state." He calls these unproductive expenditures and examples include things like luxury, war, monuments, spectacle etc. and these are necessary bc (1) an organism is always inefficient in how it takes in more energy than it needs for survival and the excess has to go somewhere,  that must be discharged, and (2) the discharge is the only route to the intensities, the sacred, the glorious, the ecstatic, etc that make life sublime (now I'm summarizing from Accursed Share which I haven't read end to end)

The hypocrisy of the Chamath bourgeois line-of-reasoning is that it masks the unproductive expenditure as productive. But think about the image that comes to mind with SpaceX: it is not starlink, solar panels, or rare earth mining, or anything else bullish analysts bring up, it's explosive rockets being shot into the sky (symbolically orgiastic and of the same essence as luxury, war, monuments, spectacle, etc). all of these things have a loss associated with them, "loss that must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning." This is the erotic layer that the bulls and bears would lose their jobs if they included in their reports, but that I think is more descriptive of the true function of the IPO.

Of course one could disagree and say the IPO is productive accumulation within the restricted economy, certainly this what the bulls are saying, but this is a company that is literally burning up capital and converting it into fire and spectacle and that makes it function as depense/ unproductive expenditure.

The next thing to think about then, and it's part of what Bataille is saying about unproductive expenditure, is that we all kind of want it, that the system needs it, that we want to see Elon send rockets into the sky the way we want spectacle and ritual and release and other forms of unproductive expenditure. Bataille says Christianity "replaced pagan expenditure prescribed by custom with voluntary alms," and now we voluntarily buy the SpaceX IPO (or involuntarily if it gets included in index funds) and the necessary unproductive expenditure is framed now as choice. The aristocrat at least slashed the throats in the open...

Bataille takes issue with this hypocrisy, but ultimately I wish we didn't find this kind of unproductive expenditure necessary in the first place (the expenditure of $2 trillion dollar IPOs and sending rockets into space I mean). There are other things in this life that produce sublime experience more than sending rockets into space.

so I tried writing an essay on all this but it sounded bland and summarizing, which is not at all the register Bataille would have appreciated. Ultimately, I turn back to Bataille's essay: 

"*The term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least intellectualized forms of the expression of a state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss*."

so here's a poem if anyone's interested: [https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-spacex-ipo?r=gseqz](https://smtsmtpostmodern.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-spacex-ipo?r=gseqz)

Bataille, the SpaceX IPO as dépense, and a poem