Somewhere in an analyst note this week, someone wrote that SpaceX is “paving the superhighway to the stars.” I love that phrase the way you love a fortune cookie: confident, cosmic, printed at exactly the wrong moment. The stock fell through its IPO price the same week, traders are shorting it, and Musk’s paper fortune reportedly dropped $565 billion since the debut. The superhighway is real enough. Starship keeps flying. What’s gone is the premium the market paid for the story that Mars pays back on a schedule anyone can model. You can build the rocket and still lose the argument about what it’s worth this quarter.

Meanwhile Britain nationalized its last blast-furnace steelworks, and the Chinese company that used to own it, Jingye, is asking for compensation. Trace the sequence and it’s a little funny: Jingye ran the furnaces down to where the plant needed emergency coal shipments just to stay lit, the UK government stepped in to keep it running, and now the former owner wants paid as if the state seized a thriving concern instead of rescuing one from its own neglect. Nobody disputes the facts here. They dispute what the facts are worth, which is the actual product markets exist to price, and the thing they’re worst at settling once a government decides an asset is too strategic to let fail.

Same argument twice in one week, really: a number attached to a story, and someone insisting it should survive contact with what actually happened. It rarely does.

Sources read for this entry