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SpaceX S-1

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Re: SpaceX S-1

#201

Post by [deleted] »

porphyra wrote: post #22
Eldodi wrote: post #3

Crazy this company will IPO for >1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets. 2025: - Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024 - Operating loss: -$2.6B - Net loss: -$4.9B - Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B - Operating cash flow: $6.8B - Capex: $20.7B Segment breakdown: - Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B a…

It's pretty much expected that a rapidly growing high tech company is gonna have a lot of losses and debt right? They're just spending huge amounts of money on capex. Not doing so would be like floating minerals in Starcraft: symptomatic of bad macro.

[deleted]

Re: SpaceX S-1

#202

Post by keeda »

stingraycharles wrote: post #161
sdwr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have different personalities. I can only imagine Altman wants to stay on top of the chaos, and believes he will come out ahead whatever happens, while Dario is trying to stay realistic and mitigate worst-case scenarios.

Being drowned in demand and scrambling for compute because you’re more successful than anticipated is a better problem than the other way around.

Oh, for sure it could be much worse -- they could have been in xAI's place! ;-)

But while this is a "good problem to have" it would have been an even better problem to avoid in the first place, because it seemed avoidable.

Now, I'm totally armchair billionaire-CEO-ing here, but anybody with any compute has been so obviously capacity constrained for so many quarters all the while scrambling like mad and spending obscene amounts of money to acquire even more compute. With lead times of 2 - 3 years, something Dario explicitly called out on Dwarkesh, it seemed prudent to acquire first, ask questions later. Worst case, they could have rented any extra capacity out, like Elon is doing!

Outsiders are reasonably questioning this mania but Dario, as one of the biggest believers in AI and even AGI, showing hesitancy seems uncharacteristic. I wonder if this is one of those rare cases where it would have been better to drink his own Kool Aid!

Anthropic got somewhat lucky that Elon wanted to stick it to Altman, but boy, even then he drove a hard bargain.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#203

Post by keeda »

s2cdd wrote: post #147
keeda wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa. I've said before, but I think Dario severely underestimated the coming demand and ensuing need for compute, and would need to pay through the nose when the crunch hit. I suspect that Google deal also worked out better for Google. This data point supports that view. While Altman got laughed out of the room as a "podcasting bro" asking for trillions in investment in compute, Dario was going on about how difficult…

[flagged]

That's fair, I'm not a finance person, just meant to say that this is costing them way more than they would have liked at a critical stage in their corporate evolution. I'm curious though what your take is.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#204

Post by greycol »

takinola wrote: post #184
Eldodi wrote: post #3

Crazy this company will IPO for >1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets. 2025: - Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024 - Operating loss: -$2.6B - Net loss: -$4.9B - Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B - Operating cash flow: $6.8B - Capex: $20.7B Segment breakdown: - Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B a…

Can someone ELI5 Starlink revenue sources? At the core, it's an ISP (but served from space). What does Starlink have that differentiates from any other ISP? Is it because the TAM is global? That may be true at the margin, but I am sure most eligible subscribers would prefer a land-based system (eg no one in SF is cancelling their Xfinity to use Starlink) so how much is really left for them?

It's because they're good speeds in a lot of places that couldn't get good speeds before. It's also great for mobile work sites, i.e. construction sites, drilling camps, other b2b service businesses where a bunch of portacoms rock up to a site. Anywhere it's mildly hilly you can't actually assume you'll get a signal outside of town but a satellite dish basically guarantees that. Even if you can guarantee your in a spot long term the upfront cost of fibre or a tower may not balance out as cheaper than just eating the higher bandwidth costs.

It's also worth remembering that in a lot of places with low density it isn't appealing for competitors to build out to, so there's a lot of markets where it's a no brainer to switch from the local monopoly to starlink because the price was already inflated and it was worse service.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#205

Post by dopa42365 »

etempleton wrote: post #158
impulser_ wrote: post #15

"in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee" Anthropic is paying them 1.2…

The whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.

The most honest memory cartel is reporting stupid profit numbers too!

>Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...

>South Korean April exports rise 48.0% y/y as chip boom extends

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-april...

To the point where the big memory makers are suddenly trillion AI-dollar companies.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#206

Post by theptip »

fooblaster wrote: post #200
theptip wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, free cash flow and unit economics are more interesting than net profit. By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.

how exactly can you assume they have unit profitability

Plenty of analysis on this point, the inputs are not secret. Check out Semianalysis for example.

They have something like 70% margin on inference.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#207

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

electriclove wrote: post #68
thetrb wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how much did SpaceX / xAI pay for these GPUs? After 3 years they'll probably be mostly deprecated.

Are GPUs from 3 years ago being deprecated today?

I thought I saw a report from someone at Google saying that they were still running 7+ year old hardware because of demand. Even if it is not state of the art, if it generates more than the electricity costs, keep it running until it dies.

Re: SpaceX S-1

#210

Post by darkwizard42 »

dmix wrote: post #188
urams wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus Uber's only increased their revenue 11->14B in the last 5yrs. This is just incredibly off. A brief look at Yahoo Finance shows revenue has grown from $31.9B in 2022 -> $53.7B in trailing 12mos.

you're right, looks I mixed up some numbers while googling. their revenue went from 11->53b in 6yrs which was very off from my original comment Which honestly surprises me, Uber was called a VC pump and dump scheme for years on HN before their IPO. Maybe that's the better lesson here (dont take financial advice from HN comments)

Uber WAS a pump and dump. Insiders used the public for exit liquidity and any public shareholders got stuck with a pretty crap stock. Uber went up 100% from IPO to mid 2025, Google went up 400% in that time period (and I picked 2025 to avoid the huge AI runup we have seen).

It was hemorrhaging in many cities using extremely profitable cities like London and NYC to keep their global competitiveness.

Uber was able to pivot and become financially sound with two moves: - Uber Eats becoming first party delivery to restaurants (it started as a limited selection of items from some restaurants and quickly evolved into a Doordash-esque competitor) - Uber launching a 1B+ RR Ads business - margins on this are obviously incredible

Both of those combined with discipline in their ridesharing business (exiting the China market with a sale + stake, dumping their self-driving business when it became a money sink) have led to a recovery in their stock price, but it is FAR from the crazy expectations set up for VCs. I expect those in the last round didn't get a great return, but obviously folk like Benchmark exited like kings.

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