This summer, an absurd company plans to go public(上市，首次公开募股) at an absurd price. If SpaceX—the rocket-maker, internet provider, artificial-intelligence lab and social network controlled by Elon Musk—raises anything close to $75bn, at a valuation(估值，价值评估) anywhere near $2trn, its initial public offering (IPO) will be the financial equivalent(等价物，等同的事物) of landing on Mars.
今年夏天，一家荒谬的公司计划以荒谬的价格上市。如果埃隆·马斯克控制的火箭制造商、互联网提供商、人工智能实验室和社交网络SpaceX能筹集接近750亿美元，估值接近2万亿美元，那么其首次公开募股将是金融界的登陆火星之举。
Already the enormous gravity(引力，影响力) of SpaceX is bending public markets. Nasdaq has changed the rules on how quickly firms are included in its index to attract Mr Musk to the exchange. Some listed companies have become public proxies for its private stock. Most obvious is Tesla. Although it owns just a sliver of SpaceX, the pair share hardware, software and Mr Musk himself. Some analysts imagine the eventual creation of a consolidated Musk Inc, an industrial Frankenstein’s monster(① 出自玛丽·雪莱1818年小说《弗兰肯...) with the body of Optimus, Tesla’s robot, and the brain of Grok, the chatbot developed by xAI, which SpaceX subsumed in February. Others fret that SpaceX’s listing could undermine Tesla: after all, why would Mr Musk’s adoring retail investors put their money into a carmaker valued at 14 times its sales when they could buy a cosmic creator of superintelligence at 100 times?
SpaceX的巨大引力已经扭曲了公开市场。纳斯达克修改了公司纳入指数的速度规则，以吸引马斯克先生到该交易所。一些上市公司已成为其私人股票的公开代理。最明显的是特斯拉。尽管它只拥有SpaceX的一小部分股份，但两者共享硬件、软件和马斯克本人。一些分析师想象最终会创建一个合并的马斯克公司（Musk Inc），一个工业界的弗兰肯斯坦怪物，拥有特斯拉机器人Optimus的身体和xAI（被SpaceX于二月收购）开发的聊天机器人Grok的大脑。其他人担心SpaceX的上市可能会削弱特斯拉：毕竟，马斯克先生崇拜的散户投资者为何要把钱投入一家市销率14倍的汽车制造商，而他们可以以100倍市销率购买一个宇宙级的超级智能创造者呢？
Tesla is not the only big company whose value is tied to SpaceX. Alphabet, the parent of Google, owned 6% of it at the end of last year. This investment, made in 2015, is a large part of the $107bn of private shares on its balance-sheet, the rising valuations of which contributed almost half of Alphabet’s pre-tax profit in the latest quarter. In March EchoStar, a loss-making telecoms company, improbably shot into the S&P 500 index for no reason other than the $11bn of stock in SpaceX it is set to receive in exchange for selling its spectrum(频谱，频率范围) licences. “We have made our bet, and that is with SpaceX,” said EchoStar’s founder after nearly five decades betting on himself.
特斯拉并非唯一与SpaceX价值挂钩的大公司。谷歌母公司Alphabet去年底持有SpaceX 6%的股份。这笔2015年的投资是其资产负债表上1070亿美元私人股权中的一大部分，其估值上涨贡献了Alphabet最近季度近一半的税前利润。今年3月，亏损的电信公司EchoStar莫名其妙地冲入标普500指数，唯一原因是它将因出售频谱许可证而获得110亿美元的SpaceX股票。在赌了自己近五十年后，EchoStar的创始人说：“我们下注了，就是SpaceX。”
Moonstruck
月狂