
SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation - dcgudeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-is-raising-500-million-in-funding-11545142054
======
martythemaniak
People who think Musk is eccentric/unhinged/unstable/etc should consider a
much simpler possibility: He's just a regular guy, and simply does not filter
himself like his peers do.

Other people in his position adopt the public/private persona and for the most
part just plain shut up. They don't tweet anything than platitudes, they don't
joke, they don't speak with random people on Twitter. They probably do this to
minimize their downside exposure, but that might not be very effective.
Bezos's bland Twitter feed hasn't stopped anyone from making into a villain.

Musk OTOH, makes Monty Python references, fart jokes, strikes up random
conversations, shittalks randos etc. Ie, things normal people do. So the
downside is a deluge of tusktusktusking at his "unstable" behaviour, but the
upside is that a lot of people like him because he comes across like a real
person rather than a PR bot.

~~~
emn13
Underlying this perspective is an implicit assumption that conventional social
filtering - a practice as old as we can remember - serves no social good; that
it's all just smoke and mirrors.

At the very least that's a remarkable assumption. We've been doing this for
essentially ever, and it impacts all kinds of stuff. In some sense, musk is to
CEO's what trump is to the presidency: all that diplomacy is just nonsense.

And - perhaps there's a kernel of truth to that; after all, the way we
communicate has changed more radically than I think we really like to admit. I
don't just mean the technology and the means, nor the social fashions: just
read (transcripts of) old communication: I think we really _think_ differently
now than a few generations back. So perhaps old norms no longer apply
completely.

But I'm not quite willing to assume that without at least some careful
thought. I think it's at least as plausible that trump and musk (to be fair to
musk: they differ in most ways, and trump is way more extreme) simply don't
communicate very strategically at all. Despite all the hot air there's little
upside; it's mostly mess.

Sure, it's entertaining. And as entertainment, that's fine. But would you want
to actually deal with people like that? And if the world _has_ changed in many
ways, what hasn't is that you're going pretty much nowhere alone. You need
cooperation and help to amount to anything constructive.

So: maybe there's a small chance this is the new norm and humanity has changed
in pretty basic ways under the influence of todays pressures and technology.
But there's also a considerable chance it hasn't.

~~~
martythemaniak
Rather than looking at it in absolutes, you can look at it in terms of
Evolutionarily Stable Strategy. In a world populated by PRBot CEOs, the one
who speaks and acts like a real person will stand out, get attention,
followers, detractors etc. In a world where everybody runs their mouth, the
CEO that acts like a "Grownup" will achieve the same outcome.

Amassing a loyal army of followers (and, inevitably, an army of detractors)
has worked out very well for him and could be one of the main reasons why
Tesla has gotten as far as it has.

~~~
emn13
I doubt it's quite that simple, but sure: in essence that makes sense. But
there's so many factors and interactions and feedback loops going on here...

------
codeulike
Bear in mind that per-kg-to-orbit, the Falcon Heavy is 50 times cheaper than
the Space Shuttle.

edit: I think thats based on programme lifetime costs, if you look at
incremental costs per launch its about 12 times cheaper -see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706930)

edit: OK maybe not the best two things to compare (although the original
vision for the space shuttle was that it would launch all US payloads, due to
projected re-usability). But FH is still way cheaper than any contemporary
competitors, see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706762)

edit: I've been looking at old pics of the space shuttle and lamenting that
its the only thing we've ever put into space that actually looked like a
proper spaceship. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-
environment-13719297/u...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-
environment-13719297/unique-footage-of-endeavour-shuttle-docked-at-iss)

~~~
aphextron
The Shuttle was expensive, but its abilities are still unmatched. No other
spacecraft has ever been able to launch a half dozen people into orbit,
capture a satellite, and return it to earth for repairs. That kind of world
leading, "best at any cost" mentality is what made the US so technologically
dominant globally from the 1950s until recently. Falcon Heavy is definitely
more efficient for getting things into orbit, but it still feels frustrating
knowing that regardless of cost, we can't actually _do_ the things we used to
be able to.

~~~
Areading314
It's abilities at killing astronauts are unmatched too... I don't see why
people still think positively of the shuttle program after all the lives that
were lost. It's like people fawning over how great the Titanic was.

~~~
gpm
The shuttle failed at a number of rather important things, that one, price,
refurbishment time, etc.

It still managed to do some pretty spectacular things no one else had ever
done. I think that's worth something. I think the people who gave their lives
thought that was worth something. I think they would rather the program be
remembered for its triumphs than its failures.

------
mabbo
While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately[0], SpaceX as a company seems
to be in good hands with Gwynne Shotwell. They're launching very regularly[1],
haven't had a customer-impacting failure in years[2] and they've got the
market cornered. They have customers lined up for years, and continually make
huge gains by reducing costs. They've got a head start by at least 5-10 years
over all new entrants (Blue Origin, Electron, etc) and are massively
undercutting the legacy competitors (ULA).

If I could invest in SpaceX, I would.

[0] I think he's overworked and burned-out himself out but can't recognize it.
Who am I to judge- I've been there.

[1] They were going to launch about 20 minutes ago actually, but scrubbed at
the last minute. They'll probably launch it tomorrow.

[2] Two failures recently were Falcon Heavy middle core doing a dive instead
of a landing due to running out of igniter fluid, and the much-watched booster
'water landing' recently, where they fully recovered the booster afterwards.
Both were successful launches.

~~~
justinator
_While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately_

I think Musk has shown something a little higher than eccentricity for as long
as he's been in the public eye. I wouldn't want to be his friend, date him,
marry him, or have him as a family member.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
If we take a step back to look at what Musk has done at scale:

* Tesla has tremendously accelerated electric car deployments. I am going to count Solar City in this bucket as well. It was not a smashing success as Tesla or SpaceX are, but it helped to accelerate solar deployments.

* SpaceX proven out booster re-usability and lowered launch prices.

* Helped start open AI which is pushing limits of building machine intelligence by tackling progressively harder problems.

Whatever you think about the man, you can't ever take away those
accomplishments. All of the current controversy looks so small and
insignificant compared to them.

~~~
wavefunction
Accusing one of the divers that rescued the kids from the Thai cave of being a
pedophile was where my admiration flipped to a much more measured regard.

~~~
Tepix
What would your reaction be if you spent time, work and money trying to help
wiht a rescue, it doesn‘t work out and then this guy tells you to shove your
rescue sub up your ass (that‘s what he literally said!)?

~~~
andyburke
Not calling them a pedophile?

Additionally, what kind of hubris is it to imagine you can help with a rescue
you know little to nothing about, especially in a way that could be viewed as
a PR stunt for one of your companies?

The proper response would have been for Elon to say: 'We were only trying to
help. I am glad everyone got out ok, and respect what the divers did to make
that happen. Perhaps what we built could be used in future situations and we
are prepared to work with rescue organizations to see if that is feasible.'

If he had said that, everyone would have cheered him. Instead, he really began
his slide off the cliff. Happily, he seems to have calmed down lately. At
least, I haven't seen any serious missteps in the last few weeks.

~~~
camjohnson26
If EMTs are treating a person who's severely bleeding and I come up and try to
help I'm just going to get in the way. Musk should have let the professionals
do their job. The sub was not remotely workable since it was too rigid for the
cave's narrow passages, and Musk should have let it go.

------
ArtWomb
SpaceX, UAL, Ariane and Blue Origin are all doing launches today. We really
need a global manifest with updated real-time links to livestreams ;)

GPS III SV01 Mission

[https://www.spacex.com/webcast](https://www.spacex.com/webcast)

New Shepard NS-10

[https://www.blueorigin.com/](https://www.blueorigin.com/)

CSO-1

[http://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-
vs20/](http://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-vs20/)

Delta-IV NROL-71

[https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/delta-iv-
nrol-71](https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/delta-iv-nrol-71)

~~~
jesseb
I use spaceflightnow[0] to keep track of launches. Not always 100% up to date
but usually updated pretty frequently, good enough for me.

[0] [https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-
schedule/](https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/)

~~~
dr_orpheus
I have been impressed with how up-to-date Spaceflight Now is. I work in the
satellite industry and once Spaceflight Now had an updated launch schedule
before we actually got word from SpaceX that our launch was delayed.

~~~
jesseb
Yeah they do an incredible job, seem to have things before certain official
channels do as you mentioned. The company I'm employed with works with
Iridium, so I like keeping track of how the NEXT deployment is going.

------
Already__Taken
If the BFR happens they'll be unstoppable. Not because of what that rocket is
but for building a company that's capable of producing something like that
whilst operating a normal ongoing launch business.

~~~
travisoneill1
Also because of what the rocket is. The military will pay through the nose for
the capability to launch a constellation in days.

~~~
evo_9
For the laymen such as myself what do you mean by 'launch a constellation'?

~~~
mikestew
In addition to sibling comment, a real-life example is the GPS constellations.
A single GPS satellite won't do you any good, but two or three (or better yet,
six or twelve) will pinpoint your location. So the US DOD, et. al., threw a
bunch of them up there at once instead of just one.

And perhaps not just the military. Iridium wants to replace their
constellation of satellite phone satellites? Is next week okay?

------
myroon5
[https://web.archive.org/web/20181218151517/https://www.wsj.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181218151517/https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-
musks-spacex-is-raising-500-million-in-funding-11545142054)

------
erikpukinskis
Puts Elon's net worth at around 27 billion!

    
    
        TSLA 59 B * 19% = 11.21 B
        SpaceX 30.5 B * 54% = 16.47 B
        Total: 27.68 B

~~~
AndrewBissell
Eike Batista got up to $35 billion (on paper), just before he went belly up.

------
jeletonskelly
Wish I could find some SpaceX shares on the secondary markets.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Wish I could find some SpaceX shares on the secondary markets_

Unless you’re willing and able to commit at least $5 million (at the very
least, $1 to 2 million) it’s not worth exploring. You’re better off buying
some merchandise [1] and sticking what you were going to invest in some bonds
or a broad-market index.

[1]
[https://shop.spacex.com/accessories.html](https://shop.spacex.com/accessories.html)

~~~
ascales
I'd even say that $5mil is on the low end of what would come up during a
liquidation event. However, now there are probably more shares that have been
bought and sold a few times, so there might be some more smaller investors
willing to cash out.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Large investors are comprised of smaller LPs. And early investors include
early employees. That said, yes, most sellers are in the $15+ million size.

------
m0zg
$30B seems steep TBH. Consider that launch revenue last year was only $3B
worldwide, and that's revenue, not profit. Granted SpaceX owns a good chunk of
that, and their margins are the best in the industry, but with another player
arriving at the scene soon their dominance could be short lived.

OTOH, if their Starlink effort succeeds (a big "if"), and they capture a
fraction of the global $1T internet access market, this $30B could be totally
peanuts. But that requires some serious faith on the part of the investor.

Still, though, if I could invest, I would. This is as close to "going to the
moon" effort as it gets these days, I'd rather bypass the government money
black hole and fund it directly.

Elon, maybe run an ICO for this?

------
ineedasername
This increase in valuation doesn't really seem justified, at least based on
what's occurred since its last one. It is roughly a $3 billion increase but
SpaceX has underperformed its targets for 2018. It had a target of 30 launches
this year, and has only seen about 20, roughly the same as 2017.

------
yalogin
Can someone knowledgeable chip in on how effective a satellite based broadband
network will be? Will it have enough throughput? How future proof will it be?
How are updates/upgrades done?

~~~
Klathmon
(This is all from memory as a fan, so take it all with a grain of salt and
please correct me if i'm wrong on anything!)

So Starlink (the name of the network SpaceX plans to build) is different than
most other satellite internet projects. While most try to put their sats in
GEO orbit (which is about 35,000 km above the earth), Starlink is going to LEO
(their sats are planned to be from roughly 350 km to 1,500 km above the earth,
those numbers aren't typos).

Starlink is also planned to have multiple orders of magnitude more sats than
any other network (mostly due to the lower orbit, since lower orbits must move
"faster" relative to your position on the ground, each individual sat may only
be within signal range for a short amount of time).

The latency from a "normal" GEO internet sat is on the order of a second or so
for a round trip, the latency for a Starlink sat is expected to be on the
order of 100ms for a round trip! They even have some plans which show that it
can have SHORTER latency in some cases than ground-based communications!

Throughput is still yet to be shown entirely, but with such a large number of
sats which all communicate between the others around them at any given time,
and some clever routing algorithms, they should be able to get a worthwhile
amount of throughput from the system.

As for future-proof-ness or updates/upgrades, the path is pretty elegant if
not a little crazy sounding. Their plan is to just let them deorbit on their
own after some time (I believe on the order of a year or so), and constantly
replace them with new sats by leaning on the cheap launches that their rocket
tech provides. Since the sats are in such a low orbit, the natural drag of the
atmosphere will slowly pull them down over time, and I believe they also have
self-deorbit capabilities. This solves the issue of upgrades (don't upgrade
them individually, upgrade them as a group over time!), and future-proofing it
with those upgrades (as the tech improves, so will the constellation over
time!)

Hopefully this wasn't too rambling and difficult to understand!

~~~
brandmeyer
Their are some downside risks to this endeavor.

For starters, there is a low utilization factor for each satellite. Humanity
is concentrated onto a fairly small percentage of the Earth's surface. Earth's
radius is about 6400 km, so at that low altitude you can only get so much out
of pivoting your antenna's towards populated areas. Each satellite will be
spending much of its time without any users (oceans and deserts), or with very
few users (rural areas).

Second, there is a belief that the next billion new Internet users are going
to be mobile users. So the market size of satellite Internet isn't "all the
people that don't currently have Internet," its much smaller than that. In the
developed world, Internet access is frequently bundled with other services, so
the potential pool of flexible customers that could be wooed away from their
current service isn't that large, either.

Finally, eventually the folks digging ditches are going to catch up. Once
fiber gets to your premises, it will be much cheaper ber byte than satellite
Internet. It doesn't matter how the last mile is traversed. Even if its fiber
to an LTE tower, it'll still be cheaper per customer than satellites.

I could be wrong about the economics. Presumably they've done the numbers, and
the plan still closes to profitability. SpaceX isn't the only one perusing it,
after all. Nevertheless, I think there is also reason for skepticism.

~~~
Klathmon
>there is a low utilization factor for each satellite

So we are getting to the limits of my knowledge here, but I believe that this
won't be as big of an issue simply because sats aren't JUST communicating with
the ground, they are communicating with each other as well. The routing system
will take sub-optimal paths (from what you'd expect) to ensure speeds stay as
high as possible and latency as low as possible (with i'm guessing some
tweaking of those 2 values when near the limit), and a lot of those are going
to include crossing those large oceans and deserts which will keep those sats
busy, and will even route toward those large underutilized areas to spread the
load out.

>Second, there is a belief that the next billion new Internet users are going
to be mobile users

I think this is where the concept of base stations really shine. Rather than
pulling fiber to all of your cell towers, you can get those "fiber quality"
speeds by just having power and a place to put the tower.

This means propping up new "traditional" cell towers is much cheaper (for
customers of Starlink anyway!) and those mobile users could be using Starlink
without even knowing it.

>In the developed world, Internet access is frequently bundled with other
services, so the potential pool of flexible customers that could be wooed away
from their current service isn't that large, either.

This is entirely anecdotal, but I'm 28 years old, and out of all of my friends
and family, only my Father has cable. TV over the internet, and streaming
services are taking over, and public sentiment isn't exactly high for the
traditional internet service providers. Many (at least in the US) feel they
don't have a choice, and if Starlink ends up being as well loved by the public
at large as SpaceX or Tesla is, then I have a feeling not only will people be
willing to switch, but they will jump at the chance!

Though a lot of that is assuming that tesla targets most home users(which I'm
not sure if they are).

>Once fiber gets to your premises, it will be much cheaper ber byte than
satellite Internet.

It may be cheaper, but it might not be as low latency! Turns out Starlink
might be able to get lower latencies across continents than traditional fiber
can currently achieve. Obviously it's still up in the air if they will be able
to deliver on these numbers, but if they can then there might be a small
portion of users who will be willing to pay top dollar for reliable low
latency connections.

But taking off my fan hat, I agree that there are still a lot of unanswered
questions about starlink, and if it ends up like most of SpaceX's other
promises, it will be downgraded at least once in "performance", end up about
10% more expensive than expected, and a few years late, but still amazing.

It may not be the next comcast powering a huge portion of the "last mile" of
the internet as we know it, but I'm hopeful it will be a great alternative
that can improve things for a significant number of people, and hopefully pays
off well for SpaceX.

------
tchen
[http://outline.com/dNX9E4](http://outline.com/dNX9E4)

------
pslam
Valuations like this always remind me of this meme which went around when
37Signals had an absurd one of their own:
[https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-
release-37signals-...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-
release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment)

$500m sounds like a lot, but the 60:1 ratio says to me that the investors
aren't confident they're getting their money back.

~~~
dwaltrip
Perhaps SpaceX didn't want to sell more than 1.6% of the company at this time,
or doesn't need more than $500 million.

------
mettamage
I wish I could have invested. Does anyone know how to do it?

------
abadd0n6w
How do you read the wall street journal articles for free?

------
czottmann
De-paywalled article link:
[https://outline.com/dNX9E4](https://outline.com/dNX9E4)

------
robhunter
Evaluation?

~~~
qnsi
30.5B

~~~
WhompingWindows
I think he's saying the word is "valuation" not "evaluation"

~~~
copremesis
Nah, He meant a 30.5 Billion checkup at the doctor's office ... I wonder who
his insurance company is?

------
sink_knob
How much leverage is too much leverage? I guess we'll find out.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Musk is raising equity, not debt.

~~~
raverbashing
So if my friend pays me $10 for 0.1% equity on my lemonade stand is my
lemonade stand worth 10k?

~~~
virgilp
It is, according to him. The world may not believe him, but that's the
statement he made. And he stands to lose up to $10 if he lied or misjudged it.

~~~
elif
he doesn't have to believe it's worth 10k.

he just has to believe that someone else can be convinced it's worth 11k.

~~~
virgilp
Right, he doesn't have to believe what he stated - "lie" was one of the
possibilities I listed. But you can't claim the gesture is meaningless.

