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

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

#51

Post by marcusverus »

grecy wrote: post #12
choeger wrote: 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 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?

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

#53

Post by dawnerd »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #49
choeger wrote: 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.

Yet. Whoever sets up the first moon resort is going to make a fortune.

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

#54

Post by DennisP »

missedthecue wrote: post #35
DennisP wrote: 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…

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.

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

#55

Post by tuatoru »

grecy wrote: post #39
qayxc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> True. But the market is tiny 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. Let's not even talk about the smartphone market.

> 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.

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

#56

Post by pietroq »

GDC7 wrote: post #13
choeger wrote: 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.

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…

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.

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

#57

Post by tuatoru »

GDC7 wrote: post #50
tuatoru wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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]

1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-... under the heading "Architecture".

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

#58

Post by GDC7 »

pietroq wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Being early = being wrong.

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

#59

Post by swyx »

missedthecue wrote: post #30
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.

this is Saudi Aramco erasure and I won't stand for it

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

#60

Post by freemint »

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.

It is not obvious that Starlink is not a liability. I have seen people make convincing economic arguments that Starlink will eat money not make money.
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