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A look into the finances of SpaceX

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221–230 of 397 posts

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#221

Isn't it amazing that you can become the richest person in the world by building companies that lose money? By lose money I mean all money ever put into the company versus profits made. The idea of creating a profitless company that somehow makes you personally rich used to be thought of as a fluke. Yes it's possible but it shouldn't happen and aside from extreme luck it won't. Something has changed. Losing money and…

Tesla doesnt lose money. It has been profitable for the past 14 quarters in a row. SpaceX clearly could be profitable if it wanted to be, and it clearly will be in the future. It will probably be very profitable. Most tech companies lose money before they make money. Amazon lost a shitload of money before it started turning a profit, now Jeff Bezos is the 2nd richest person in the world.

> > Amazon lost a shitload of money before it started turning a profit

Amazon businss model was/is based on selling books/toys etc. online. Basically Walmart but online + obsession over customer and improving the quality of life of the customer + AWS Cloud.

Tesla business model is based on the political choice to do away with fossil fuels. They aren't the same.

Tesla is the product of a centrally planned economy because the avg. person didn't jumpstart the Tesla/EV phenomenon. Matter of fact when the avg. person is left free to choose with their wallet they stil buy ICE cars, despite all the billions in subsidies, funny math and psyop over the population to convince them that they are evil because they don't have the same time horizion of a SV billionaire who thinks that we should go to Mars because the Earth will be destroyed by the sun 5bn years from now.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#222
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the changes seem to be great to me. Long form video. Longer posts. Revenue sharing. Great changes so far

I think most people focus on bringing back far-right people to the platform, making the application inaccessible to logged out users and the failed attempts at Twitter Premium or whatever it's being called.

for me it’s the vocal Twitter users who say with a straight face that it’s the “town square” and who talk about “the global conversation” and just won’t accept that only a vast minority of their town or globe actually post on it or participate in the way they’re suggesting.

the whole platform — users and owners — are just incredibly full of themselves in an _annoying_ way.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#223
Don't worry about SpaceX, it's now an essential part of the US military. Without SpaceX's satellite internet the war in Ukraine would have been much hard to deal with. SpaceX's capacity to launch rockets two or three times a week is something the US military is war gaming around, never mind the same thing but soon with the Starship. SpaceX is in good hands just as its increasing enterprise value shows.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crew-1 to Crew-6, DM-2, Inspiration 4, Axiom 1, Axiom 2 10 missions A crewed mission to the ISS every 6 months plus a handful of commercials. Your numbers are way off.

thanks, thats what i get for asking bing instead of looking myself

Ah the penalty of dated LLM models

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#225
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what uber rich lifestyle? he owns no mansions, no yachts, and i’m not sure he has any super cars. this is a man who sleeps at the office on several occasions.

This is marketing. His "home" is a tiny shipping container type thing because he actually lives in his rich friend's mansion most of the time.

I'm sure it is - but sleeping in his friend's mansion is most definitely not indicative of Elon needing money to fund his 'uber-rich' lifestyle.

You haven't refuted my points of him not owning anything indicative of his 'uber-rich' lifestyle, and considering the amount of work he is very visibly doing, I see no reason to somehow assume he's just laying around buying stuff for the heck of it.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of hate on anything Elon does. The market is valuing his companies based on exactly what you stated. If people read the mission statements of these companies and listen to what Elon says, it is pretty clear on what his goals are. And contrary to what most believe, it is not to make himself tons of money. These companies are going to make money as a means to accomplish their goals. The control could shi…

> > read the mission statements Musk has been making mission statements ever since the days of Paypal. It's been 30 long years. And he has never delivered tangible quality of life improvement for the avarage American You can hate on Gates and Bezos and Zuck, tell you what, I will be joining you in that fight. But the products and services that they signed off are everywhere in society and if you disappeared them you'…

> Disappear Tesla and SpaceX and you'd have the manbun and big latte crowd throw a tantrum on ExTwitter and not much else. Life will go on as usual, for all practical purposes it's like you disappeared Tiffany&CO

Tell that to the people who depend on StarLink for rural internet access.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of hate on anything Elon does. The market is valuing his companies based on exactly what you stated. If people read the mission statements of these companies and listen to what Elon says, it is pretty clear on what his goals are. And contrary to what most believe, it is not to make himself tons of money. These companies are going to make money as a means to accomplish their goals. The control could shi…

> > read the mission statements Musk has been making mission statements ever since the days of Paypal. It's been 30 long years. And he has never delivered tangible quality of life improvement for the avarage American You can hate on Gates and Bezos and Zuck, tell you what, I will be joining you in that fight. But the products and services that they signed off are everywhere in society and if you disappeared them you'…

Really? If Microsoft disappeared we would see a massive jump in Linux and Mac usage. If Facebook/Instagram people would jump on the next social fad. If Amazon disappears people would buy there stuff from some BigBox store. If AWS disappears that would be really painful for a while before people adopt.

On the other hand. If Tesla disappears all the competitors will keep milking their ICE cars, since none of there EV make any profit. If Starlink disappears Ukraine is fucked, yes even if Elon has secretly given Putin access to all the satellites or whatever is the rumor of the day.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > read the mission statements Musk has been making mission statements ever since the days of Paypal. It's been 30 long years. And he has never delivered tangible quality of life improvement for the avarage American You can hate on Gates and Bezos and Zuck, tell you what, I will be joining you in that fight. But the products and services that they signed off are everywhere in society and if you disappeared them you'…

> And he has never delivered tangible quality of life improvement for the avarage American Neither has Ferrari or Rolex but that doesn't make them failures. Most of Musk's companies deliver good value to customer, just not cash flow profits from revenue to the companies themselves. They do somehow still deliver profit to shareholders via stock price movements though. It's not clear if Tesla will ever achieve long-ter…

> > Neither has Ferrari or Rolex but that doesn't make them failures

In fact Rolex, Ferrari, Fender etc. aren't valued at 680 billions. They are valued like status symbol companies . Again like Tiffany & CO.

As they should be, Musk convinced people that Tesla will deliver 'Standard Oil-esque type quality of life jump in the life of the avg. citizen.

Instead it's just a Ferrari made in Silicon Valley. When people will wake up it's gonna hurt many people who believed in this dream, which was more a mirage tbh.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#229

Isn't it amazing that you can become the richest person in the world by building companies that lose money? By lose money I mean all money ever put into the company versus profits made. The idea of creating a profitless company that somehow makes you personally rich used to be thought of as a fluke. Yes it's possible but it shouldn't happen and aside from extreme luck it won't. Something has changed. Losing money and…

If you have a growth company with high return on capital the worst thing to do would be to return the operating profits as taxed dividends or just sit on the cash or something like that. If you can grow the business then the best thing to do with those operating profits is to pump it back into expanding the business and the capital and capturing more revenue next year. You aren't losing money, you're building a large…

There's a difference between accounting profits and economic profits.

Growing a company that loses on its unit economics (eg. WeWork) ought not to make founders rich

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk of putting people on Mars is how they recruit young idealistic engineers. I think to understand what SpaceX is actually about you need to understand who Michael Griffin is and what he's all about. He went with Musk when he tried to buy an ICBM from Russia; he conceived of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services program and gave the contract to SpaceX, before SpaceX had ever put anything into orbit. Ditto the Commerc…

Can you state what you mean, instead of the innuendo, please?

SDI, obviously. Did you click the link? My innuendo is thinner than rice paper, it's a joke to prod you into clicking that link. Michael Griffin's entire career revolves around kinetic interceptor based SDI, e.g. Brilliant Pebbles. The only way to build such a system is to develop rocket boosters that let you launch tens of thousands of satellites, which is what SpaceX has been working towards the entire time.
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