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A look into the finances of SpaceX

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Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#231

Post by bagels »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #207
electriclove wrote: post #168

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'…

He makes a lot of false claims, but Starlink, and maybe Tesla essentially creating the market for electric cars?

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#232

Post by [deleted] »

htss2013 wrote: post #140

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…

[deleted]

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#233

Post by lokar »

dahfizz wrote: post #71
mrguyorama wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And NASA will probably be very happy to use such a cheap system once they are convinced it meets their reliability standards. The point of SLS IMO is to keep a backup option if SpaceX has some horrific, unpredicted setback or design problem. Surely people understand redundancy in aerospace right?

You are giving members of congress way too much credit. They don't care about the moon one bit, SLS is just a jobs program

It’s more a subsidy to defense contractors

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#234

Post by Dig1t »

mrguyorama wrote: post #63
Laremere wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go work for them on a position that has equity as part of the compensation. Otherwise, I doubt it. Elon has been pretty vocal about regretting making Tesla public. Additionally SpaceX as a company is oriented around putting humans on mars. Until that happens, I expect a supermajority of ownership would be against the profit seeking motives that an IPO creates. Short of investing in them, you could look for companies…

>Elon has been pretty vocal about regretting making Tesla public That's laughable, because without making Tesla public he wouldn't be able to live the superstar uber rich lifestyle he thinks he deserves. Pretty much everything he has personally is owed to Tesla public valuation.

Elon had tens of millions of dollars before starting Tesla. He risked all of it to start Tesla and SpaceX.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#235

Post by screye »

htss2013 wrote: post #140

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…

SpaceX funding is covert US defense spending. It is the most efficient $ spent by Pentagon.

It us economically inefficient but every thing in US defense is so mindbogglingly economically inefficient that it makes SpaceX look like amazing value. (and IMO justifiably so)

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#236

Post by pfdietz »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #192
pfdietz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SLS is needed only because they were not allowed to adopt on-orbit propellant transfer. With rockets like the Falcons, propellant (which is most of the mass needed to get something to the moon) is launched in smaller quantities and accumulated. What sort of future in space do those advocating SLS imagine for us if moving a liquid from one tank to another is too challenging?

One where we just launch one rocket instead of building a giant orbital bomb slowly (accumulating fuel) and transferring all those explosives through a complex series of difficult rendezvous maneuvers? One rocket is risky enough. There's a huge amount of extra risk involved in that sort of idea, which is why NASA isn't doing it, which can just be avoided with SLS and Starship.

It's actually less risky. Most of the launches are of propellant, which is completely replaceable. Reliability of a launcher is achieved by using it many many times, exposing all the gotchas. SLS will launch so infrequently it will be extremely risky.

And you didn't answer my question, so I will answer it for you. If simply transferring a liquid from one tank to another is too risky, then there is no future in space. No activities of any significance could ever be done there. With that established, we can shut down the human space program and lose nothing of value.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#237

Post by HWR_14 »

bell-cot wrote: post #35

From Reuters... > In 2022, revenue doubled to $4.6 billion, helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559 million from $968 million, the WSJ reported. > The company reported about $5.2 billion in total expenses for 2022, up from $3.3 billion the year earlier, according to the report. That $5.2B of expenses got 61 successful, production Falcon rocket launches in 2022. Vs. some pretty-reasonable estimates put t…

That ~$5billion per launch includes a lot of amortized R&D and other costs that you are not counting in the 61 successful Falcon launches. It may be that the Falcon launchers are significantly cheaper, but the accounting methods are too different to just compare numbers.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#238

Post by Dig1t »

misiti3780 wrote: post #150
hallqv wrote: post #98

Incredible to double revenue YoY on that level. Elon and Spacex team are truly extraordinary.

Half of hacker news thinks Elon is some random evil idiot who is got really lucky twice.

3 times if you count zip2, his first company, from which he netted $22M.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#239

Post by runnerup »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #228
reaperman wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don’t know what you want us all to agree on here. It sounds like GP disputed you setting the bar at “should have improved the lives of most Americans”. That did seem like an unreasonable bar to judge companies by.

It’s not super controversial that Tesla is likely overvalued, but shareholders generally still have a reasonable expectation of upside on new shares purchased so they continue to buy. I’d hope most of the qualified shareholders understand those returns are coming from speculation rather than valuation.

“Silicon Valley” seems inaccurate, most Tesla employees are in Nevada, Texas and China.

Also you talked about “Elons companies”, not just Tesla. The only company I can think of that maybe hadn’t been delivering value to both customers and shareholders is SolarCity. It’s acquisition was super sketchy but it no longer exists in any case.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#240

Post by rurp »

electriclove wrote: post #168
dabeeeenster wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why this is being upvoted. They are launching mass into space at between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude lower cost than anyone else. The R+D costs on that is insane. And they are almost profitable. I 100% agree that du-jour saas companies raising 300MM on limited revenue is one thing, but this is not the same.

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…

> 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.

If you believe that, I have a social network to sell you...

Come on, the guy who keeps cozying up to the political party that denies global warming and loathes environmental protections is just looking out for the planet? The guy who spends hours on twitter trolling people, and refuses to honor contracts and severance payments is actually a misunderstood good guy?

Elon is great at attracting talented people and investors to his companies, and a big part of that is his ability to spin a compelling yarn about saving the planet or living on mars bases. That doesn't mean he's actually trying to save humanity. We're already seeing him pivot to a totally different persona, or maybe just not bothering to hide his true self as much.

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