It's such a shame this company is not traded publicly. I would be willing to risk a couple of thousand of euros and bet on them being successful in the long run. A company like this has nearly infinite potential for growth.
Hacker News really really really seems to think the stock market is solely focused on short term results, meanwhile, Tesla is valued at $770 billion dollars because they maybe might create a valuable energy business sometime in the future.
Other examples are Uber, DoorDash, Lucid Motors, etc... money losing companies with nosebleed valuations because investors believe in the long term.
Kinda... but Elon has a controlling class of shares that would maintain total control even after an IPO. Still a hassle and subject to shareholder lawsuits though.
Elon has said numerous times Starlink will be split off into a private company, just as soon as they get a handle on what it's revenues are going to look like long term.
I saw that, and it struck me as odd. I was under the impression that Starlink was intended to be the cash-cow that funds the Mars colonization project. I suppose it'd make sense to IPO if he prefers cash "now" to future income, but colonization will be a major resource sink for decades. How will SpaceX fund the colonization project if they spin off Starlink?
Starlink will not be a cash cow but a cash sink that burns money to keep SpaceX busy. By having other people foot the bill SpaceX is getting most of the money from the endeavour via launch costs without losing any control of SpaceX.
They said the same about Concorde, 30 years later, forget supersonic travel, aviation is not available for major amount of population and airline run on thin margins.
At a 100B valuation you'd be kinda late to the party.
Non-SaaS, non-tech platforms and non-biotech companies have a really hard marketcap ceiling.
SpaceX builds stuff in the real world, macrostuff with millions of moving parts, that's like black death for economic margins, they also aim to go into an environment such as space which is very hard and has slapped us time and time again.
There is no convetional ROI for us up there, there maybe is in the form of artificial economics such as the morale boost that the country gets when a rocket goes up.
But if that's the case the US could just push for having the Olympics every 2 years given that it sweeps the gold medals everytime.
A 200k usd on a public SpaceX is a bet on Musk being able to convince people other than yourself that SpaceX is in fact a tech-platform a SaaS or a biotech.
Revenue is projected to be 3 billion this year, projected to be 10 billion by 2025. You also get Starlink with it, which is valued at 10 billion by itself.
At 10x revenue, it is valued similar to Facebook, Microsoft and Google.
Last time I checked the important metric in business is revenue - cost of goods sold
If they are approximately the same you are just running a big operation, not a profitable business. And I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, being at the helm of a big operation feels great and gives the master of the ship a lot of meaning, but it's not a profitable enterprise.
Even SaaS, bio-tech and platforms feel the pain and the anxiety every minute they spend without being profitable.
Despite what the CEOs say, it's like being underwater, you can be optimistic about your ability to swim towards the surface, but still you got to get there.
It's all about future growth potential. A company that is growing it's revenue at 50% y/y is going to get much higher valuation than a profitable saas growing at 10-15% y/y.
If you are not Saas , biotech or a tech-platform then revenue growing isn't as of itself a good news.
You need both revenue growing and costs staying flat or just slightly increasing
Only the SaaS, biotech and platforms get a free pass, because the rationale is that once you become the dominant player , drive everybody out of business and kill competitors in the cradle thanks to your strategy aimed at acquiring marketshare...you'd then be able to sweep the market because you'd found yourself in a monopoly or quasi-monopoly regime, thanks to the network effects and a huge first mover advantage.
No matter what Musk says : cars and rockets aren't tech-platforms.
Of course you can bet on his ability to convince people other than yourself that they are, but that is a social engineering bet, on the charisma and the salesman ability of mr. Musk, it's not an enterprise or a business bet.
Nothing wrong with social engineering bets, they are the most profitable ones and you can ride on the way up and all the way down, like Thiel and Robert Mercer did with Trump for example.
It's not like they believed he'd Make America Great Again, they believed he could convince people other than themselves that he'd do so.
Facebook, Microsoft, and Google are so valuable because their marginal costs are 0. SpaceX Won't be worth 10x revenue. Companies in capital intense industries with high variable costs have caps less than 5x revenue, with 2x being common.
I am guessing you aren’t a big crypto investor :). You are making an assumption that the other investors are all rational and use the same criteria when buying stocks. That is becoming less and less true every day.
My point is that some stocks people are buying with their hearts and not as much with their brains. They believe in the future and they buy no matter what the price. Revenue multiples are not considered. Spacex will almost certainly be one of these stocks when it goes public.
Furthermore, $650 billion is spent on advertising each year and growing. That's a huge TAM for ad-tech companies like Google and Facebook.
What is the global spend on space launches annually? $5 billion maybe? And not growing very quickly, if at all. And most of that market is inaccessible because many of the biggest space agencies prefer to keep things in-house, even if it means a worse product at a higher cost.
SpaceX is at the moment the only feasible enabler of humanity as an interplanetary species. Their deeds can open up a new economic growth regime that has no practical upper limit, we can expand to trillions of people in the solar system. You really cannot price this properly. No single company was so pivotal in the history of humanity.
You , me , our descendants 50 generations down the road will all be dead before anything like that even begins to happen. Like 0.01% of the progress towards the trillions of humans vision you , Musk and Bezos are talking about.
Aren't you convinced by Starlink? There's a subscription business that should have great margins. It fits right in with the new remote work paradigm. Literally working from anywhere including the middle of the ocean is possible but only with Starlink. Other companies cannot offer enough bandwidth.
Then you have to think about how many people want to work from the middle of the ocean, or anywhere else other than where their family/relatives/community is
HN is a bubble in a bubble, ask around, 99.999999% of the population will tell you they don't give a fuck about starlink and even less of a fuck about remote work and "digital nomadism".
Is this true? It’s been my dream to use it on a boat and be able to work from there, but my understanding was that you had to have the satellite dish in a permanent fixed location on land.
You still need a downlink base near you, so while you are ok on Cuba if the base station is Miami. Getting a connection on Easter island is still not possible without using the fiberlink to that island.
EDIT: looking at that map, it's better to say that Puerto Rico can not get a connection from Miami, but Cuba can.
We won't leave cities because of the remote work. Humans feel the need to be together socially. Now there are 2 schools of thoughts about work;
one says that working is a social activity and thus remote work is doomed (IBM tried and failed before the pandemic)
The other says that working is just working.
Now even if the proponents of the latter are right and the whole world were to switch to 100% remote work you'd still would want to be living in NYC or LA for the social scene.
If anything the big winners are going to be the megalopolis where the social scene is more vibrant and people are more open compared to NYC and LA.
Thinking about Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Bogotà...at least for Americans who can speak Spanish.
They have Fiber down there, but sure there are niches such as the new Aerion supersonic plane, but is that enough?
Africa and Asia are getting urbanized faster than everywhere else.
Lagos, Nigeria will be home to 88M people in 2100, Kinshasa, RDC 72M.
I don't care how bad their infrastructure is now, running fiber in such a high density populated are will always be better than relying on internet via satellite.
If you are in countries that have the institutional capacity to protect it and your ownership of it, sure, lay network infrastructure.
Despite the growth of the large cities, most African urbanization is due to villages growing past a threshold where they are statistically counted as towns (IIRC 10 000 inhabitants), and therefore as urban, though. "Greater Lagos", the coastal-urban strip running from Abidjan in the west to Port Harcourt/Douala in the east, is mostly like this: villages that grew.
* Most African population growth is still going to be outside these megacities, and even within them, only the centres will have much infrastructure, unless there is massive social change leading to institutional reform.
Edit: clarifying this, which I should have done first: The majority of the population for at least the next 40 years will be in areas with population density below about 1000 people per square km, where Starlink is viable but laid cable is expensive.[1]
> I would be willing to risk a couple of thousand of euros and bet on them being successful in the long run. A company like this has nearly infinite potential for growth.
Seems you are disregarding competition, regulations and lots of other unknown unknowns here. As for a hypothetical listing, the investors themselves are there to make back their investment. To do this, they sell 'some' of their shares for a profit.
If they were to list, I won't be surprised to see the stock being heavily manipulated by the institutional investors just to catch the retail traders out.
is there a precise difference between spacex as a unicorn or just a very valuable private company? Because they are basically a private aerospace firm but I'm not sure whether they're doing anything that distinguishes them as a startup. They are older than say Facebook after all.
Boeing's market cap is $132 billion, so it's not obviously crazy. They're already the world's cheapest launch provider by a significant margin, and currently the only human-rated private launch company.
They've started launching the second-generation Starlink sats, which transfer data directly between each other by laser. If they get approval for the full network, they'll have total bandwidth about equal to the entire internet today.[1] It won't be competitive in cities but it'll be great in lower-density areas, exactly where cable/fiber are expensive. That alone is worth a lot of money.
If Starship with anything close to the turnaround they're claiming, they'll multiply the world's launch capacity by several orders of magnitude, drop launch costs by a couple orders of magnitude, and open up all sorts of applications in space that aren't affordable today.
There's risk of failure but altogether I'd say all that's worth as much as Boeing. If these things succeed, they'll be worth a lot more.
> They're already the world's cheapest launch provider by a significant margin, and currently the only human-rated private launch company.
True. But the market is tiny. There have been 114 orbital rocket launches in 2020 [0], 25 of which were SpaceX F9 flights and 14 of them were Starlink deployment missions.
This means that currently, SpaceX is its own best customer with more than half of their launches being used to deploy their infrastructure.
As far as commercial crewed missions are concerned, there has been one so far with at least two further missions in the pipeline for the next 12 months. Even if I'm being generous and grant them two private crewed missions per year, that's not exactly a multi-billion dollar business.
Considering that Boeing isn't just in the space launch business but also is the second part of the global commercial jet duopoly besides Airbus and is a major defence contractor as well, I'd think that the valuation contains a lot of... optimism?
As it stands Starlink loses money with each customer for the ground equipment. Starship isn't flying yet and realistically speaking, the future of Starlink depends on that system to both work and be significantly cheaper than F9.
> Even if I'm being generous and grant them two private crewed missions per year, that's not exactly a multi-billion dollar business.
Didn't each shuttle cost several billion dollars to refurnish in between launches? There will certainly be a market for this if SpaceX is capable of meeting the demand, especially in the near future as the ISS ages and the international community begins to build and man the next generation of space stations.
> Didn't each shuttle cost several billion dollars to refurnish in between launches?
No. The launch costs of the Space Shuttle include infrastructure and development cost. Original cost projections were based on up to 50 launches per year.
With an actual launch cadence of just ~3 launches per year, accumulated costs skyrocketed when distributed over all launches.
Another factor was the heat shielding, which didn't meet the requirements for fast inspection and maintenance due to its flawed design - a flaw that was addressed by Soviet Buran by the way. It remains to be seen whether SpaceX manages to get around this problem in their latest design.
> There will certainly be a market for this [...] and the international community begins to build and man the next generation of space stations.
Plural even? That's a bold assumption. Every commercial venture relies on incentives. There's currently only very little incentive to build crewed space stations.
There are basically only three major applications that ware known to benefit from micro-g environments: optronics manufacturing, growing natural organs, and tourism.
The first two have the same problem in that it only works out if mass production can be achieved. Otherwise getting raw materials to- and finished products back down from orbit is way too expensive for it to be economically feasible.
Tourism cannot be a mass market either. It's not just the price that makes it a very exclusive niche market, but also the medical requirements. William Shatner for example might be able to survive a suborbital hop with Bezos' space dildo, but wouldn't pass the medical exam for a full blown orbital flight, no matter how much money he'd pay.
Another factor for the tourism industry is maintenance and staffing. Even with 3 month crew rotations, the costs for just staffing a space station would be quite substantial. For reference, the crew-to-passenger ratio of luxury cruise ships is between 1.3 and ~4 [0].
Tourist space stations would be in that category, too for various reasons so I'd expect similar ratios there.
Hemodialysis costs Medicare $90,000 annually per patient.[1] Space kidneys could cost $500K and the government would probably still save money, especially if they're based on the patient's stem cells (or very close matches) so immunosuppressants aren't necessary.
Kidneys don't mass much. We don't need super-cheap launch to make space kidneys worthwhile.
3D organ printing appears to be advancing rapidly and zero-g is thought to make things significantly easier but no, I don't think we're there yet. I was just responding to the previous comment, which claimed it would only be economic in mass production due to launch costs. I think that's incorrect due to the massive expenses incurred by dialysis patients. The cost of a kidney can be quite high and still save money compared to dialysis.
I used the cost of dialysis but it's not even just the dialysis itself, it's also dealing with the complications that come with it.
> We don't need super-cheap launch to make space kidneys worthwhile.
It'd still be a giant gamble, because both progress in artificial kidneys and new methods for 3d-printing organs could make dialysis obsolete faster than space-grown organs could be available.
Keep in mind the market for automobiles was tiny before the automated production of the Model T, and the market for the personal computer was also tiny before Apple invented it.
> the market for automobiles was tiny before the automated production of the Model T
I think that's a false analogy. Automobiles are a lower-latency, cheaper to operate, cleaner, faster substitute for the horse and cart, which many people already had and many more desired. There was a big market and it had high price elasticity of demand.
The analogy here would be for hypersonic point-to-point travel over large distances on the Earth. It's not at all clear how big or elastic the latent demand for that would be.
It is clear that dumping a lot of water vapor in the stratosphere would have climatic consequences.
Boeing is worth $132 billion, but they also have a backlog of over 5,000 commercial aircraft, and a valuable defense business on top of that. They will likely have more profit over the next 4 quarters than SpaceX will do in revenue. I don't really think it's an appropriate comparison for SpaceX.
If you just look at what SpaceX does today, then definitely not. But Starship would drastically expand the market, and a full rollout of Starlink would turn SpaceX into a major telecom company on top of that. Both are far enough along to take into account for valuation.
Or it will absolutely tank the the market price as satellite projects are multi year projects and the demand will only grow slowly outside Elon selling launch slots to himself (Starlink).
There's a few mutual funds that own SpaceX shares, it'd be interesting if someone bought those and just canceled out all the other companies (not super familiar with finance so I don't know how feasible this is)
In this case it is secondary sale between current investor and a new one.
Even from a fundamentalz perspective they are doing really well. They control more than 50% launch market, just won a 3 billion dollar NASA contract, have huge cost advantage over everyone else, their starlink service is in beta with 100,000 already generating in 120 million revenue. This is not even including any future potential of starship etc.
