SpaceX Series N

Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund dumping three-quarters of a billion dollars into SpaceX at a $137B valuation is like watching Godspeed You! Black Emperor add a fourth crescendo to "Storm" – technically impressive, objectively unnecessary, and you can't help wondering if everyone involved has lost the plot. We're 13 rounds deep into this funding saga, and the cap table probably reads like the liner notes to a Broken Social Scene album: bloated, incomprehensible, and featuring way too many people who think their contribution was essential. December 2023 market conditions were about as hospitable to mega-rounds as a basement venue is to a 40-piece orchestra, yet here we are, pretending that adding another $750M to Elon's war chest represents some kind of breakthrough. The valuation multiples here make absolutely no sense unless you're pricing in successful Mars colonization, which – and I cannot stress this enough – is not happening in any LP's investment horizon.

My father told me once that the best investments make you feel something real, not just FOMO dressed up as conviction. This deal makes me feel the same way I felt watching established indie bands sign to major labels in 2004: vaguely nauseated and concerned for everyone's judgment. SpaceX's fundamentals are genuinely strong – Starlink revenue is real, launch cadence is unmatched, the technology actually works – but at $137B you're not buying a company, you're buying into a mythology. Compare this to Rocket Lab at a $4B valuation doing actual innovative work in small satellites, or even Boeing's defense division trading at reasonable multiples despite their… everything. The growth trajectory here is asymptotic; we've reached the part of the album where the guitar feedback just keeps building but never actually resolves into anything cathartic.

The investor signaling here is less "smart money knows something" and more "too big to fail becomes too big to value properly." A16z and Founders Fund aren't making a Series N bet on discovering something new about SpaceX – they're making a bet that they need exposure to The Elon Industrial Complex for portfolio optics, which is possibly the saddest reason to deploy capital since someone funded that Strokes comeback album. The exit potential is a joke wrapped in a meme wrapped in a regulatory nightmare. IPO? At this valuation? In this geopolitical climate where half of Congress wants to regulate Starlink into oblivion and the other half wants to investigate Elon's Twitter posts? The only exit here is a partial secondary sale to the next round of true believers, which is less a liquidity event and more a game of elaborate musical chairs set to Mogwai's "My Father My King."

Late-stage SpaceX rounds have become the venture capital equivalent of post-rock's diminishing returns – Explosions in the Sky kept making albums after "The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place," and technically they were fine, but did anyone really need them? The red flags flutter like prayer flags on Everest: concentration risk around one erratic founder, regulatory exposure that would make a nuclear power plant operator nervous, customer concentration in government contracts that could evaporate with one administration change, and a valuation that requires everything to go perfectly in an industry where rockets literally explode. This deal exists in the uncomfortable space between genuine innovation and financialized mythology, and I'm tired of pretending that writing another check at a higher valuation constitutes actual due diligence.