Anthony Scaramucci – the financier and former White House communications director who has become a Trump critic – offers what is meant to sound like caution about the reported SpaceX IPO.

The “cult of personality around Elon Musk”, he writes, has created “an excessive premium that is off the charts”.

True, only he then proceeds to justify investing in precisely those terms, talking about Musk’s ability to turn science fiction into fact.

Musk idolatry aside, the most revealing line is Scaramucci’s invocation of Amazon. “I missed Amazon. $10,000 (€8,479) invested in the Amazon IPO on May 15th, 1997 would be worth almost $20 million today. The guys who bought it were right. I wasn’t. I’m not making that mistake again”.

There’s one problem with this line of reasoning. Amazon, which is worth $2.7 trillion today, floated at a $438 million valuation in 1997.

SpaceX is being discussed in the context of a $1.75 trillion-$2 trillion valuation.

Put another way, a $2 trillion valuation is about 4,566 times as much as $438 million. Scaramucci’s analogy requires a remarkably elastic view of what counts as “the same mistake”.

The Information reports that SpaceX lost almost $5 billion in 2025 on revenues of $18.5 billion. These are not the numbers one associates with a $2 trillion company.

SpaceX might well go on to achieve all kinds of amazing feats, but is there anything left to price in?

Robotaxis on Mars, perhaps, or something similar farther down the roadmap?

Additionally, the Financial Times reports that SpaceX has considered allowing some existing shareholders to sell on day one, bypassing the standard 180-day lock-up.

Combined with plans for a major retail allocation, it raises the unseemly prospect of informed insiders being allowed dump their shares on ordinary investors buying into the story at peak enthusiasm.

Investors should be careful. Those looking for the next Amazon may reasonably question whether it begins life at $2 trillion.