This is the kind of draft you would attach: a real piece of thinking, not a polished essay. It is shown below exactly as written, in Markdown. Notice the rough edges — notes to self in {braces} and (parentheses), unfinished sentences, a controlling idea, and separate exploration and planning notes. These are exactly the features a genuine draft has.
Sample draft — raw Markdown
# The SpaceX IPO
**Controlling idea:** The initial public offering of SpaceX marks the transition into a new age of capitalism.
## Draft
On Friday June 12th 2026 SpaceX listed on the NASDAQ, in the largest initial public offering in history, dwarfing Alibaba and Saudi Aramco. The event made Elon Musk 350 billion dollars richer in a day, and the value of the company was set 1 trillion dollars higher, twice what mainstream analysists estimated, and surpassing the value of the entire Canadian stock exchange {check this}. I will show that 'bubble' no longer applies, and argue that a new age of capitalism began with the IPO.
SpaceX is not a normal company. With Twitter and Starlink they control a media empire and have more assets outside the jurisdiction of any country than has ever existed. A communications network that has proved instrumental in the Ukrain war (cite here)
Price-to-sales (p/s) is a useful metric to define here: it shows the amount of business a company does compared to the price of the shares. A more common metric is price-to-earnings, but since SpaceX is not profitable, so we have to use p/s. For the second half of the 20th century p/s of top US companies (S&P500) was less than 1.0, it averaged 0.5 between 1974-1985. Now the p/s is 3.5 - unprecedented. But SpaceX has mind-boggling p/s of 112 after its first day of trading. To help put this into perspective, when Apple launched the iphone their p/s was 3.6. This means Apple was making $200 of sales for every $1000 of value the company had. SpaceX's p/s of 112 means they're making about $9 for every $1000 of company value.
The NASDAQ changed its rules for including SpaceX in the index, effectively forcing the public to invest an additional 6 billion dollars.
Historically the term bubble has been used to describe a stock market which was overvalued. The analogy says healthy companies grow like organisms. Bubbles, on the other hand, are full of air. They grow, the soap gets spread thinner and thinner, and then they burst and splash to the ground. SpaceX is so over-priced at birth that the realities of investment are being brought into question. The bubble analogy doesn't hold; there is no soap from the start. The company is a fiction - it's not even a space company, but it filed as a programming and data processing company (7370).
## Exploration notes
- How do you define, limit and narrow your thesis to a single issue? — concentration of power through the perpetuation of the fiction of money
- What can we assume the reader knows? — Who is Elon Musk
## Planning notes
- Introduction — missing background
- inequality — 350 billion is enough to eradicate all poverty in the world for one year
- military influence of spacex — Find a citation saying starlink was key to ukraine's military success this year (I know I read it a few times - who says this most reputably?)
The argument is that they have enough military leverage to tip the field in global conflicts.
- The ridiculous numbers, the fiction of money — p/s over 100, where 1-1.5 was typical for most of the last 100 years
https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price-to-sales
- oligarch changing the rules: index funds being forced to buy-in
- fascist
- Bubble doesn't capture it
- spacex up-side — Some good points:
- profitable rocket company (2024)
- starship (although overdue) is nearly flying and will 5x the orbital launch business
- reusable rockets done ten years ago, still no competitors
- starlink could defacto become the internet backbone and upset the entire telecommunications market
- Conclusion — I haven't claimed that there is no value in spaceX, but shown how it breaks the rules
This is sample material for Assignment 4 — you do not need to use this topic.