SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#21

Post by jsf01 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #18

GDC7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

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.

>middle of the ocean

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.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#22

Post by GDC7 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

aeternum wrote: post #18

GDC7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

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.

If anything it's a dying business model.

The world is getting more and more urbanized.

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?

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#23

Post by llboston » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

jsf01 wrote: post #21

aeternum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>middle of the ocean 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.

not yet, but will be once SpaceX starts to mass launch their next-gen satellites that communicate with each other with laser.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#24

Post by GDC7 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

nabaraz wrote: post #16

GDC7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

No, you aren't. 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.

Everybody is focused on revenue.

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.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#25

Post by aquadrop » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

bpodgursky wrote: post #10

kiba wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being publicly traded means they're at the whim of short term investors.

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.

It also creates incentive for short traders to create negative publicity.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#26

Post by emj » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

jsf01 wrote: post #21

aeternum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>middle of the ocean 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.

https://starlink.sx/

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#27

Post by Barrin92 » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

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.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#28

Post by colinmhayes » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

nabaraz wrote: post #16

GDC7 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

No, you aren't. 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.

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.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#29

Post by qayxc » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #17

sschueller wrote: post #11

Is this at all realistic at this point?

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 entir…

> 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.

There's a lot of if's riding on that valuation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_spaceflight

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#30

Post by missedthecue » Sat, Oct 09, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #27

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.

At this point, why not throw Koch industries in the list.