SpaceX于2026年6月12日上市至今，已有一个多月了，从上市之初的轰轰烈烈，但如今的股价从最高点腰斩，仅仅用了不到50天的时间。地球首富马斯克的身价也由巅峰期的约1.45万亿美金，缩水了一半。不过本文不想探讨股价和身家的涨跌。因为股价涨涨跌跌本身就很正常，马斯克的身家缩水一半也依然是世界首富，就算再缩水一半也依然是全球首富。这次想探讨的是当时买入的人，他们的投资逻辑是什么。

正好看到一篇文章，出自诺贝尔经济学奖获得者保罗.克鲁格曼，发表在SpaceX上市当日。文章很有意思（包括标题），我这里全文摘录，并借助翻译软件进行了翻译（点击原文：https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/elon-musk-human-ponzi-scheme)

“Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme 

With Wall Street’s help, you’re about to be forced to buy stock in SpaceX

埃隆.马斯克 人类庞氏骗局 保罗.克鲁格曼 2026年6月12日

Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.

昨天我进行了一次短途旅行。我首先乘坐了当地的超级高铁(Hyperloop)，它穿过由隧道挖掘公司（注：Boring Company，马斯克创立的一家隧道挖掘公司）挖掘的隧道。然后，我使用神经植入物叫了一辆特斯拉全自动无人驾驶出租车。在旅途中，我阅读了来自火星殖民地的最新消息。

OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.) Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.

好吧，这些都没发生过，因为这些产品根本不存在。超级高铁（Hyperloop）还没投入运营。隧道挖掘公司（The Boring Company）也没开挖过任何商业隧道。特斯拉只在奥斯汀有几辆自动驾驶出租车——还不是完全自动驾驶的——其他地方还都没有。（谷歌的Waymo无人驾驶出租车已经在几个主要枢纽城市投入运营。）据称在脑植入领域处于领先地位的Neuralink公司，只在少数患者身上测试过其产品，仅此而已。当然，火星殖民地也不存在：既没有载人火星飞行，在可预见的未来也没有这样的前景。

Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Musk promised that each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.

然而，在过去十年中的不同时期，埃隆·马斯克曾多次承诺，这些服务最晚都将在2025年之前推出。

Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.

诚然，马斯克确实取得了一些成功。特斯拉在电动汽车领域走在了前列，而星链不仅是一项至关重要的服务，也是一项可行的商业模式。

But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.

但这些成就并不足以让马斯克成为世界首富。相反，他的财富历来主要建立在自我实现的信念之上——相信马斯克是天才的投资者纷纷买入他所控制的公司股票，而这些公司市值的飙升又进一步提升了他天才的声誉。

We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.

有些企业看起来很成功，因为它们不断吸引新的投资者，而之所以能不断吸引新的投资者，是因为它们看起来很成功。我们有一个词来形容这类企业：庞氏骗局。埃隆·马斯克基本上就是一个活生生的庞氏骗局。

Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration.

此外，SpaceX 正在进行的 IPO 比以往任何时候都更加清楚地表明，马斯克最强大的技能并非开发未来产品，而是他精通金融运作以及利用内部关系的能力，尤其是他对特朗普政府的影响力。

To see what I mean, consider Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X. To finance the deal, investment banks lent Musk $13 billion, debt they planned to quickly move off their books by selling it on to investors. But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee. By the summer of 2024, X was valued at less than half of its purchase price. Faced with losses of 40 cents on the dollar if they sold the debt, his bankers were forced to hold the Twitter debt far longer than anticipated, prompting the August 2024 Wall Street Journal headline: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis”.

为了说明我的意思，不妨看看马斯克在2022年收购Twitter（后更名为X）的案例。为了筹集资金，投资银行向马斯克提供了130亿美元的贷款，他们计划通过转售给投资者迅速摆脱这笔债务。然而，马斯克彻底摧毁了X的商业模式，将其变成了一个极右翼、亲纳粹的粪坑，导致广告商纷纷撤离。到2024年夏天，X的估值已不足收购价的一半。由于如果此时出售债务，将有高达40%的本金损失，马斯克的银行家们被迫更长时间持有Twitter的债务，这也促成了2024年8月《华尔街日报》的头条新闻：“埃隆·马斯克收购Twitter是金融危机以来银行业最糟糕的收购案”。

But then two things happened that bailed out the banks along with Musk’s future creditworthiness: the 2024 election of Donald Trump and the advent of AI. After Trump’s election, advertisers began returning to X, citing a need to appease Musk and Trump. And in March 2025, Musk merged his newly-founded AI company xAI with X, playing off the accelerating AI buzz to further prop up X’s valuation and his own personal balance sheet.

但随后发生的两件事不仅拯救了银行，也提振了马斯克未来的信誉：2024年唐纳德.特朗普当选总统以及人工智能的出现。特朗普当选后，广告商开始重返X平台，理由是需要安抚马斯克和特朗普。2025年3月，马斯克将他新成立的人工智能公司xAI与X合并，利用人工智能的蓬勃发展进一步推高了X的估值，同时也改善了他个人的财务状况。

Unfortunately for Musk, xAI’s Grok is, by all accounts, much inferior to the AI models offered by Anthropic and OpenAI. It’s also widely considered unsafe and unreliable. At one point it began spewing racist and antisemitic comments, dubbing itself MechaHitler. Trump administration officials have pushed government agencies — including the Pentagon — to use Grok, but with little success.

对马斯克来说不幸的是，据各方评价，xAI 的 Grok 远逊于 Anthropic 和 OpenAI 提供的 AI 模型。它也被广泛认为不安全且不可靠。它一度开始散播种族主义和反犹主义言论，并自称“机械希特勒”。特朗普政府官员曾敦促包括五角大楼在内的政府机构使用 Grok，但收效甚微。

So Musk, having bailed out X by rolling it into xAI, is now bailing out xAI by rolling it into SpaceX, which has a genuinely successful business in Starlink. And today SpaceX is going public. Its initial public offering (IPO) debuts today on the Nasdaq at a price that implies a 18.7 billion last year and lost money.

所以，马斯克先是通过将X公司并入xAI来拯救X，现在又通过将xAI并入SpaceX来拯救xAI，而SpaceX所拥有的星链业务确实非常成功。今天，SpaceX正式上市。它的首次公开募股（IPO）今天在纳斯达克发行，发行价意味着这家去年营收仅为187亿美元且亏损的公司，其估值将达到1.77万亿美元。

How can this, um, astronomical valuation be justified? The IPO is premised partly on the assumption that retail investors will buy in, not because they have made any rational assessment of SpaceX as a business, but because they believe that they are buying stakes in Elon Musk’s genius.

这种天文数字般的估值如何才能合理化？此次IPO的部分前提是，散户投资者会买入，并非因为他们对SpaceX这家公司进行了任何理性评估，而是因为他们相信自己是在购买天才埃隆·马斯克的股份。

But the ranks of the faithful may not be enough to keep the shell game going. So Musk’s Wall Street allies are also rigging the game. Some of the major stock indexes, notably the Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell, have recently changed their rules in order to admit SpaceX almost immediately.

但光靠信徒可能不足以维持这场骗局。因此，马斯克在华尔街的盟友们也在暗中操纵游戏规则。一些主要股指，尤其是纳斯达克100指数和富时罗素指数，最近修改了规则，以便在SpaceX上市后立即将其纳入指数。

It’s important to understand that the inclusion of a company’s shares in a major stock index carries enormous financial rewards. A large share of stocks is held in “index funds,” mutual funds that hold portfolios designed to mimic the behavior of major indexes. Thus there is an immediate demand for the shares of a company when its shares are added to a major index because index funds must now add them to their portfolios.

必须指出，公司股票被纳入主要股票指数会带来巨大的经济回报。大量股票都被“指数基金”持有，这些共同基金持有旨在模拟主要指数走势的投资组合。因此，当一家公司的股票被纳入主要指数时，其股票的需求会立即上升，因为指数基金必须将其纳入投资组合。

Historically, the major indexes have waited at least a year after a company’s IPO before considering its inclusion in their market measures, to give the stock time to “mature”. The bending of the rules for SpaceX shows that Musk is again exerting his ability to co-opt and corrupt key institutions. (Notably, the S&P 500 has resisted the pressure and will wait a year before including SpaceX.)

历史上，主要股指通常会在公司上市至少一年后才考虑将其纳入其中，以便给股票时间“成熟”。SpaceX 打破规则的做法表明，马斯克再次展现了他拉拢和腐蚀关键机构的能力。（值得注意的是，标普 500 指数顶住了压力，将等待一年后再把 SpaceX 纳入其中。）

Which brings me to my final point. The immense human Ponzi scheme that is Elon Musk will eventually collapse. But traditional Ponzi schemes only exploit investors who choose to participate. This time much of the money propping up Musk’s scam will come from ordinary Americans who have in effect been forced to buy in. Approximately 52% of mutual fund assets are now invested in index or index-based funds, and over 50% of American households are invested in mutual funds. Thanks to the collusion between Musk and Wall Street, enabled by the perception that the Trump administration has Musk’s back, many if not most of these small investors will be dragged, willy-nilly, into fueling the Musk juggernaut.

这引出了我的最后一点。埃隆·马斯克这个庞大的庞氏骗局终将崩盘。但传统的庞氏骗局只会割那些自愿参与的投资者的韭菜。而这一次，支撑马斯克骗局的大部分资金将来自被迫参与的普通美国民众。目前，约52%的共同基金资产投资于指数基金或指数型基金，超过50%的美国家庭投资于共同基金。由于马斯克与华尔街的勾结，以及人们普遍认为特朗普政府会支持马斯克，许多（如果不是大多数）小投资者将被迫卷入其中，不由自主地助推马斯克的这台庞然大物。

Should anyone in Trump’s America be surprised? 在特朗普时代的美国，有人会对此感到惊讶吗？”

小结一下：克鲁格曼并没有否认马斯克的成就，而是对他在电动车、以及星链业务中的成就给予了肯定。克鲁格曼在意的其实有三点： 第一、散户对马斯克的狂热是基于对其本人的信仰，相信马斯克的“自我实现”过去会成功，未来也能成功。 第二、相比于其实业上的成就，马斯克的财富增长更多是建立在其与华尔街的金融运作以及与特朗普政府的特殊关系之上。 第三、也是最为克鲁格曼所诟病的，马斯克的华尔街盟友为了SpaceX的上市，修改了股指的纳入规则，导致共同基金被动买入，而超过50%的美国家庭投资于共同基金，这就导致大量普通美国民众也买入了该公司，不管是否喜欢。（被点名的两家，一家是纳斯达克100指数，一家是富时罗素指数，只有标普500指数顶住了压力，坚持要等到SpaceX上市一年后再决定，表扬！）

克鲁格曼认为，如果是投资者自主买入的，那无可厚非，愿赌服输，但是这种通过修改股指，从而让许许多多普通美国百姓被迫参与进来的游戏，是要受到严厉禁止和谴责的。

当然，现在判断SpaceX是否成功为时尚早，也不能因为现在股价较高点腰斩就说这不是家好公司，马斯克过去吹过的牛逼好多也实现了，这次万一就成了呢。只是想说，作为投资者，好的公司不等于好的股票。如果买入价格过高，就算后面业绩做起来，可能已经透支了未来二十年的成长。