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The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

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Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#91

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

oskarkk wrote: post #75
HeavyStorm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not very informed on SpaceX plans, but one thing I think people gloss over is how much maintenance a data center requires. Parts fail, computers get stuck on crash loops, etc. A space data center would need workers - computer people, not astronauts - and a constant supply of parts tob replace hardware. Whoever wrote this proposal doesn't understand neither space nor data centers.

Is a data center satellite really that different from a communications satellite? Starlink sats must have some significant processing power and nontrivial control system, and they work without physical maintenance. One data center sat is like one server rack, if it fails, it's fully lost and you just deorbit it, as it's done with Starlink sats. They sent 12443 Starlink sats to space, deorbited 1684. The thing that ma…

Communications satellites don't have nearly as much long-term rewritable storage needed.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#92

Post by jltsiren »

laughing_man wrote: post #85
Arnt wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it going to be huge? Who are the customers and what do they want? I don't follow this closely, just look at the pretty pictures. If there's demand for lifting much bigger/heavier things to orbit than presently possible, I would probably not know, for lack of pretty pictures. So please tell.

Starlink will be the biggest customer, at least initially. They're planning on both substantially increasing the number of satellites in the constellation and increasing the size of those satellites. That will keep it in the black for years even in the absence of other work.

In that scenario, most of the value would be in Starlink.

Launch vehicles have always been the cheap part in going to space. Payloads tend to be more expensive, and the actual value is in the services enabled by the payloads.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#93

Post by laughing_man »

jltsiren wrote: post #92
laughing_man wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink will be the biggest customer, at least initially. They're planning on both substantially increasing the number of satellites in the constellation and increasing the size of those satellites. That will keep it in the black for years even in the absence of other work.

In that scenario, most of the value would be in Starlink. Launch vehicles have always been the cheap part in going to space. Payloads tend to be more expensive, and the actual value is in the services enabled by the payloads.

The revenue is in Starlink, sure, but the value is in the launcher.

The reason payloads are expensive is because launch was expensive. If you're paying $10k/kg to launch your satellite you have to make sure it has a 99.9999999% chance of working when it gets to orbit. But if you lived in a world where you pay $10/kg for that same launch and could schedule another launch the next day to replace a payload that didn't work, your satellite would be much cheaper because you could afford to have it fail.

It would also be cheaper because you could afford more standardization. You could afford to use a standard bus, for example, even if it makes your satellite heavier than it needs to be.

There's a virtuous circle here. Cheaper launches mean cheaper satellites, and cheaper satellites mean more launches as previously un-economic activities start to pencil out.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#94

Post by ben_w »

adastra22 wrote: post #87
ben_w wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed. That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so. In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use…

That has been how Elon always operates. It’s “green lights to Malibu” timeline estimation. He does it for a reason.

That much has always been obvious, however (1) note final paragraph, and (2) the stock price estimates (both SpaceX and Tesla) are also based on "green lights to Malibu" degrees of optimism.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#95

Post by jltsiren »

laughing_man wrote: post #93
jltsiren wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that scenario, most of the value would be in Starlink. Launch vehicles have always been the cheap part in going to space. Payloads tend to be more expensive, and the actual value is in the services enabled by the payloads.

The revenue is in Starlink, sure, but the value is in the launcher. The reason payloads are expensive is because launch was expensive. If you're paying $10k/kg to launch your satellite you have to make sure it has a 99.9999999% chance of working when it gets to orbit. But if you lived in a world where you pay $10/kg for that same launch and could schedule another launch the next day to replace a payload that didn't w…

Payloads are expensive, because high-value businesses can outbid low-value ones. By the time there is enough launch capacity for low-value businesses, manufacturing improvements should have made launch vehicles even cheaper.

Or you could look at this from another perspective. The services enabled by infrastructure must be more valuable than the infrastructure itself to justify the investment.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#96

Post by tavavex »

xoa wrote: post #79
tavavex wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller. Why? Logically it would seem that learning how to do something that's already been done would be easier than discovering it. SpaceX has already done a lot of the work and has shown the others that it's possible and how they do it. Why won't the others catch up? I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competiti…

> I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever. You're on Hacker News and you can't think of silicon fabrication? What brand new players do you think are about to catch up to TSMC or Samsung? Or what about advanced jet turbine engines, why is China still having such trouble matching the performance of existing leaders after decades of work? Or opera…

But I wasn't talking about things that are just hard to replicate. I was talking about companies that keep getting further away from anyone matching them, forever. No one can match ASML's prowess, but do you think that China today is further from catching up to them than they were 10 years ago? Going from nothing to modern silicon fabrication is a lot harder than going from existing knowledge but no expertise/technology to implement it, to actually making it happen. That's my point.

You have a valid point about ecosystems though - that is a rare exception where first movers can keep holding onto their advantage that I hadn't thought of. However, it's not really applicable when talking about a commodity like space launches.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#97

Post by small_model »

ben_w wrote: post #60
small_model wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the best selling car in the world? Model Y at 4x the price of number 2. So nope, your claim died on first hurdle. Try harder

No, the best selling car in the world is the Toyota RAV4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4 The best selling EV brand in the world is BYD: https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03... The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y. Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the…

The RAV4 is multiple models so not really the same car, BYD is a subsidised financial basket case, it wont last long, What is Tesla's Market Cap vs these companies? The market has decided with all the information it has, I'll side with that than your pedantic arguments. But maybe the market is wrong and you are correct, then you should be shorting Tesla with all you might.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#98

Post by laughing_man »

jltsiren wrote: post #95
laughing_man wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The revenue is in Starlink, sure, but the value is in the launcher. The reason payloads are expensive is because launch was expensive. If you're paying $10k/kg to launch your satellite you have to make sure it has a 99.9999999% chance of working when it gets to orbit. But if you lived in a world where you pay $10/kg for that same launch and could schedule another launch the next day to replace a payload that didn't w…

Payloads are expensive, because high-value businesses can outbid low-value ones. By the time there is enough launch capacity for low-value businesses, manufacturing improvements should have made launch vehicles even cheaper. Or you could look at this from another perspective. The services enabled by infrastructure must be more valuable than the infrastructure itself to justify the investment.

I don't see a reason to believe that wouldn't be the case.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#99

Post by ben_w »

small_model wrote: post #97
ben_w wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the best selling car in the world is the Toyota RAV4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4 The best selling EV brand in the world is BYD: https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03... The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y. Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the…

The RAV4 is multiple models so not really the same car, BYD is a subsidised financial basket case, it wont last long, What is Tesla's Market Cap vs these companies? The market has decided with all the information it has, I'll side with that than your pedantic arguments. But maybe the market is wrong and you are correct, then you should be shorting Tesla with all you might.

> BYD is a subsidised financial basket case,

I can say that about Tesla. Like, 1/3rd of their total lifetime net profit has been subsidies of one kind or another, mostly government-created regulatory credit programs.

> What is Tesla's Market Cap vs these companies?

Irrelevant, especially as the narrative being used to prop up the market cap this year is "we're not a car company, we're an AI company".

> then you should be shorting Tesla with all you might.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

What I have done is sell all my Tesla shares and put them into other things where I see realistic growth opportunity.

That way I don't need to time things perfectly for a relatively small reward (100% if they go bankrupt, vs several times better than that just by simply buying NVIDIA and watching line go up) that comes with successful shorting.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#100

Post by SideQuark »

small_model wrote: post #57
SideQuark wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re claiming in 10 years they made something others won’t for another century? This has no historical precedent. China is going to eat them, just like they ate Teslas insurmountable lead in a few short years.

Whats the best selling car in the world? Model Y at 4x the price of number 2. So nope, your claim died on first hurdle. Try harder

Ah, trying to move the goalposts huh?

What’s the number of Teslas sold per year? Declining year over year as others have grown significantly. Profit margin sans regulatory issues? Peaked 2021, declining since then. Same in about every company wide metric.

BYD? Most all such metrics over the same period doubled to quadrupled. They outsell Tesla. They have better tech than Tesla. They’re clearly out innovating and outselling Tesla.

And, as the other poster made clear, your moving-the-goalposts let’s-ignore-the-rest claim doesn’t even stand slight scrutiny. Try harder indeed.

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