menu_open Columnists
Shawn Tully

Shawn Tully

Fortune

We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

How Elon Musk rewrote SpaceX’s story—and turned it into the greatest IPO debut in history

By convincing investors that AI will power his moonshot, SpaceX broke records in its trading debut.

yesterday 10

Fortune

Shawn Tully

SpaceX lowballed its bankers on fees. Goldman Sachs has another way to win big

The real money comes after the opening bell.

thursday 3

Fortune

Shawn Tully

A $7 billion horse race: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley battle for ‘lead left’ position ahead of OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs

Only one bank can occupy the coveted lead underwriter position for this year's hottest AI IPOs.

10.06.2026 10

Fortune

Shawn Tully

How Michael Saylor’s preferred stock gamble could trigger a death spiral for Strategy

Michael Saylor leveraged Strategy to the hilt. Now the math is working against him.

09.06.2026 10

Fortune

Shawn Tully

SpaceX needs to grow 60x in a decade to justify a $1.75 trillion valuation. No company has ever come close

SpaceX's valuation will set the bar for what the must achieve going forward to reward investors.

06.06.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

A single new sentence in SpaceX’s amended IPO filing could signal the biggest merger in history

A SpaceX-Tesla merger could be the endgame.

04.06.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

How Kelly Ortberg is rebuilding Boeing from the inside out

Kelly Ortberg inherited Boeing's worst crisis in decades. His fix: stop chasing Wall Street and start building planes the right way again.

01.06.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

If Elon Musk merges SpaceX with Tesla he’ll create a $3.4 trillion behemoth—with zero profits

A SpaceX-Tesla union would mark by far the largest merger of all time.

31.05.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Surging Treasury yields expose a brutal truth: America has no margin for error on its $39 trillion debt

America must refinance $10 trillion in debt over the next year. Rising Treasury yields could make that a catastrophe.

30.05.2026 10

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Top analyst has harsh words for SpaceX debut: ‘We recommend that investors avoid this IPO’

Research firm CEO David Trainer says SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO valuation is mathematically indefensible

29.05.2026 50

Fortune

Shawn Tully

SpaceX’s $80 billion IPO has a catch: 78% of the money is already spoken for

Investors rushing into SpaceX's blockbuster IPO may not realize how little of the record-breaking raise will actually go toward the company's future.

28.05.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO filing just told us what business he’s betting on for the future—and it’s not rockets

Elon Musk's creation has essentially re-invented itself from a commercial space pioneer facing little competition, to an AI-centric player battling...

23.05.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

‘It’s crazy’: SpaceX could set records as the least shareholder-friendly public company of all time

Elon Musk has mandated two classes of shares, binding arbitration, and many other policies shareholder advocates hate in the Space X S-1.

22.05.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

With bond yields surging to 4.7%, T-notes are looking like a better deal than the pricey S&P, says the Research Affiliates’ formula

Record stock prices, surging bond yields — Research Affiliates has surprising advice on where to invest for the next 10 years.

21.05.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Forget tariffs and the Iran oil shock—a top economist says the Fed is blind to the real inflation threat

"We have an aggregate demand issue, not a supply disruption issue," says William Luther, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University.

19.05.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Boeing lost China. Trump—and 500 jets—may be about to win it back

Beijing hasn't ordered planes from Boeing since 2017. That could soon change.

14.05.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Michael Burry, Paul Tudor Jones, and a Nobel-winner all see the same thing: A stock market reckoning

The last time Shiller's CAPE index soared to 40, the market took 12 years to recover.

13.05.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

‘I lost more money than anybody in the history of capitalism!’: Remembering Ted Turner

No one dreamed—or lost—bigger than maverick media mogul Ted Turner.

10.05.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

‘If he tells you he can beat me, I’ll sue!’: Inside the $9 billion friendship between the CEOs of Amex and Delta

Amex's Steve Squeri and Delta's Ed Bastian clicked so well that they are now buddies in pursuing both profit and fun.

09.05.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Why GameStop’s bid for eBay echoes one of the worst business deals of all time

GameStop's play for eBay echoes the AOL-Time Warner deal in eerie detail—and that should terrify eBay's board.

09.05.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The CEO who was told he’d never run American Express has made Amex cool again—and is beating JPMorgan, Visa, and the S&P 500

The unlikely story of how a Queens-born outsider turned around a giant by betting young people would happily pay $900 a year for a credit card.

06.05.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman built a program to teach young leaders about China. It’s harder to get into than Harvard

Inspired by the Rhodes Scholar program, Schwarzman's philanthropic initiative brings students in their early-to-mid-20s to spend a year immersed in...

02.05.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The debt crisis Congress has been ignoring could cost the average U.S. household $18,000 a year, according to a Brookings analysis

Taxing the rich doesn't get remotely close to solving the debt crisis. So a solution will likely sweep across all income levels.

30.04.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

‘Take the money and run’: Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke on why the UAE quit OPEC

The move didn't surprise Hanke, who served on the UAE's Financial Advisory Council from 2008 to 2014.

29.04.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

According to Warren Buffett’s math the stock market is officially in ‘playing with fire’ territory. So when is the next crash coming?

According to Warren Buffett's math the stock market is officially in "playing with fire" territory.

25.04.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

How Spirit Airlines’ business model collapsed—and why a Trump bailout could make things worse

Covid, a failed merger, and now a spike in jet fuel prices have conspired to make Spirit's finances unworkable.

23.04.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The housing affordability crisis isn’t just crushing millennials—it’s squeezing out buyers in their 40s, 50s and beyond too

"When purchasing power declines, fewer people buy homes at 28—but also fewer purchase at 38 or 48," writes the Housing Center's co-director Ed Pinto.

22.04.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The one metric Warren Buffett says can crash the stock market just hit a dizzying new high

The "Buffett Indicator" has been a closely watched stock market valuation gauge ever since the legendary investor explained his reasoning in a 2001...

19.04.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

United CEO Scott Kirby and American CEO Robert Isom were once colleagues known as the ‘dream team.’ Now Kirby wants to acquire his rival

The dueling CEOs of United and American have a long history of circling each other in the industry.

18.04.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Could United and American airlines really merge? 5 key questions about a blockbuster deal

Industry insiders told Fortune that a tie-up between the first and fourth largest U.S. carriers faces hurdles, but can't be ruled out.

17.04.2026 50

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The hidden menace behind Big Tech’s AI arms race: Meta, Amazon and others are spending billions on hardware that’s worthless in 3 years

The new industrial era may be a lot more beneficial to the folks and businesses that use the AI-enhanced products than the enterprises that furnish...

15.04.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Most of Wall Street points to high oil prices as the driver of inflation. A maverick Johns Hopkins economist says they’re chasing the wrong culprit

The oil crisis will end with the war, it's the inflation predicament that has legs, predicts Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins.

14.04.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The ‘affordability economy’ has created a housing market nobody predicted: Prices collapsing in the Sun Belt, soaring in the Rust Belt

Las Vegas, Austin, and Miami are now leading a national price downturn, while metros like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee are finally having...

11.04.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Why Trump’s 2027 budget could be the document that triggers a debt crisis

$7.8 trillion in extra revenue, GDP growing at 3%, vanishing deficits, and a 42% defense hike—to skeptics Trump’s math just isn’t adding up.

09.04.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

A J.P. Morgan analyst sees 60% downside to Tesla stock—and he may be too optimistic

Elon Musk's pivot from electric vehicle sales to self-driving taxis and robotics will clobber Tesla's earnings, and could crush its shares.

07.04.2026 10

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The ROAD Act passed by the Senate aims to expand America’s housing supply. It’s likely to shrink it instead

The ROAD Act aims to keep big investors out of the single family home rental market. Critics say that could kill investment in new homes, and drive up...

29.03.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Some cried. Others were speechless. How front-line workers walked away with checks averaging $240,000 when KKR sold their company

They knew they were getting a payout. But employees at CoolIT had no idea just how much they'd profit from KKR's sale of their employer.

29.03.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Social Security insolvency: How a ‘six figure cap’ to flatten benefits for the ultra-wealthy could buy the program 7 critical years

A nonpartisan think tank is proposing a fix that promises significant progress towards putting Social Security on a path to self-sufficiency.

26.03.2026 50

Fortune

Shawn Tully

‘Say thank you and get out’: Why one top strategist says to dump Magnificent 7 stocks now

Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates warns that AI hype has stretched growth stock valuations to a breaking point—and the next decade will look nothing...

19.03.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

S&P 500 will return just 3% a year for the next decade, top strategist warns

A $200 billion index fund strategist breaks down why U.S. large caps will deliver one-fifth the returns of the past decade—and which markets to own...

17.03.2026 50

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The $265 billion private credit meltdown: How Wall Street’s hottest investment craze turned into a panic

Inside the dramatic comedown for highflyers like Apollo, Ares, Blue Owl and KKR: "It resembles a run on a bank."

14.03.2026 60

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Trump’s Iran war could hike national debt by $65 billion in 60 days, while tariffs add another crushing blow

The Pentagon told lawmakers that they estimated the cost of the war exceeded $11.3 billion in the first 6 days of the conflict—and that didn't even...

12.03.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Trump’s Iran war could hike national debt by $65 million in 60 days, while tariffs add another crushing blow

A Wharton analyst told Fortune that if the conflict rages for a total of two months, it will inflict net new expenses on U.S. taxpayers of $65...

12.03.2026 30

Fortune

Shawn Tully

How the Iran war’s nearly $1 billion-a-day price tag is deepening America’s debt crisis

Should the Iran war drag on for even several more weeks, the damage to America's fragile finances will prove substantial.

11.03.2026 50

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The toughest guy on Wall Street

From the archives.

10.03.2026 20

Fortune

Shawn Tully

To justify a $1.5 trillion market cap after its IPO, SpaceX would need to earn more than Berkshire Hathaway. Here’s why that’s so unlikely

The real moonshoot? Hitting the financial targets it would take to justify the market cap Elon Musk has been musing about.

08.03.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

The unexpected 92,000 drop in payrolls is a clue we might be reading the AI jobs narrative all wrong

Is AI taking jobs? Or are companies cutting jobs to pay for the enormous capex outlays on AI?

07.03.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

SpaceX is poised to raise more money in its IPO than was raised in last year’s 90 IPOs, combined

And that means Wall Street will make more money, too.

05.03.2026 40

Fortune

Shawn Tully

Ray Dalio, Scott Bessent and House members from both sides of the aisle are rallying around a ‘3% solution’ to tame the out of control national debt

Bipartisan consensus is building in support of lowering the gulf between revenues and outlays to 3% of GDP.

01.03.2026 50

Fortune

Shawn Tully

New Fed report proves Milton Friedman and Joe Biden understood something vital about immigration—and explains why growth may sputter under Trump

A new research paper found that the huge influx of foreigners under President Biden's open border policy had the beneficial role of increasing the...

22.02.2026 80

Fortune

Shawn Tully