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

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41–50 of 73 posts

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

#41
post #2

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.

Elon has said repeatedly that SpaceX is his way of establishing a colony on Mars.

Going public has an extreme risk of deviating from that goal in favor of more profitable activities. He won't do it.

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

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well if that's the case we can all go home, welcome our quant finance overlords with grace and hope they are magnanimous towards us mere mortals.

Reading other people's minds is not yet possible :( , for everything else there's AQR, RenTech and D.E. Shaw.

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

#43
post #24
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#44
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.

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".

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

#45
post #22

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.

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…

> If anything it's a dying business model.

For values of dying that include an unserved market of about 2 billion people in Africa and Asia.

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

#46
post #43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#47
post #29
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

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

#48
post #43
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#49
post #2

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.

But, really, how much is a planet worth? The moon hasn't been profitable.

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

#50
post #45
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If anything it's a dying business model. For values of dying that include an unserved market of about 2 billion people in Africa and Asia.

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.

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