What do SpaceX and Bitcoin have in common?

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SpaceX and Bitcoin

Two very different bets on the future

“SpaceX and Bitcoin are basically to me the same thing,” veteran macro investor Jordi Visser recently told Anthony Pompliano. He was talking less about what they do than why people are willing to pay so much for them:in both cases, today's valuations depend heavily on expectations that may take years to play out.

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For SpaceX, investors are betting that today's rocket and satellite businesses could eventually support a much larger economy beyond Earth. Bitcoin offers a different vision, one in which a scarce digital asset becomes an increasingly important part of the financial system.

Visser argues that this makes conventional valuation unusually difficult. “When something doesn't have a valuation, it can't be overvalued or undervalued,” he said. “It's a complete guess.” That may be going too far, particularly in SpaceX's case, but it gets at the unusual amount of future expectation already reflected in both assets.

SpaceX has a business to measure

SpaceX is not simply selling a dream about Mars. It already has customers, government contracts and businesses generating billions of dollars in revenue, with Starlink emerging as an increasingly important part of the company. SpaceX also makes money launching satellites and carrying payloads for commercial customers and governments.

The harder question is what comes next. Starship is designed to carry much larger payloads while being fully reusable, potentially reducing the cost of putting equipment into orbit. SpaceX is also looking toward orbital computing, while its longer-term ambitions still include the Moon and Mars.

Investors therefore have something concrete to work with, but much of the excitement around SpaceX rests on markets that could look radically different a decade from now. Revenue from today's businesses can be measured. The eventual size of an economy built around cheap, frequent access to space cannot.

How do you put a price on Bitcoin?

Bitcoin makes the problem even more unusual because there is no business underneath it. It has no revenue, profits or dividends, and there is no management team expected to turn today's investment into greater earnings tomorrow.

Its supply, however, is remarkably easy to predict. Bitcoin's rules limit the total amount that can ever exist to 21 million coins, and new issuance gradually declines over time. If demand rises, miners cannot simply produce more to meet it.

Demand is the difficult part. How many people and institutions will ultimately want Bitcoin? Will it take a larger place alongside gold as a store of value, or remain a volatile alternative asset?

Investors have built plenty of models around those questions, from comparisons with gold to adoption curves and onchain metrics. But there is no future earnings report that will eventually tell them whether they were right.

Abundance meets scarcity

Perhaps the most interesting connection is actually an enormous difference between them. SpaceX is trying to make access to space cheaper and more widely available, turning something extremely scarce into something more abundant.

Reusable rockets are central to that idea. Instead of throwing away major parts of a launch vehicle after every flight, SpaceX wants to use them repeatedly, bringing down costs and making far more launches economically possible.

Bitcoin was built around the opposite idea. No matter how popular it becomes, its maximum supply does not increase. If more investors want it, they have to compete for the same limited pool of coins.

The contrast is almost symmetrical. SpaceX is trying to create value by making access to something scarce more abundant, while Bitcoin derives much of its appeal from ensuring that its own scarcity cannot disappear. Both still depend on the same unknown: whether enough people will ultimately want what they make possible.

Where investor excitement is moving

SpaceX's public debut offered a striking demonstration of investor appetite for ambitious technology bets. Its IPO attracted more than $250 billion in orders for an initial $75 billion offering, while AI companies and infrastructure projects have continued to draw enormous amounts of capital.

Bitcoin has regained momentum too. It has risen more than 40% over the past three months, while U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $2.4 billion in the week through Sept. 25, their strongest weekly inflow in nearly a year. The surge pushed their net flows for 2026 back into positive territory after they had been almost $5.8 billion in the red in July.

The two are not necessarily competing for the same money, but they do compete for investor attention. That attention can shift remarkably quickly between crypto, AI and other emerging technologies, and Bitcoin's recent recovery shows that enthusiasm for one vision of the future does not necessarily have to come at the expense of another.

How much is the future worth?

SpaceX investors can start with an existing business and then make increasingly ambitious assumptions about how large it could become. Bitcoin investors know exactly how scarce the asset will be, but have to guess how much demand that scarcity will attract.

Neither future can be predicted with much confidence today. Further advances in reusable rockets could create markets that currently sound improbable, just as broader adoption could give Bitcoin a much larger role in global finance.

That may be the strongest part of Visser's unlikely comparison. SpaceX is asking investors to imagine what happens if access to space becomes commonplace. Bitcoin is asking them to imagine what happens if digital scarcity becomes valuable enough to matter for decades.

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