151–160 of 344 posts
Maybe hacker news is wrong and SpaceX is actually valuable.
I don't think anyone is arguing SpaceX is actually valuable, just overvalued and the repeated recipient of obvious corruption.
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I will be very concerned for MSFT if small companies start outperforming larger companies. That's when Microsoft's advantage disappears. If AI truly encourages smaller, flatter organizations. IMO large enterprise adoption is their moat.
Installed by default is their moat. Trying to arrange a video conference on other platforms means making sure that everyone has the client installed, which can be a real headache. Teams is the common denominator.
This investment has never been secret. Google (now under parent company Alphabet) invested roughly $900 million as the majority of a ~$1 billion funding round alongside Fidelity Investments. This gave Google an initial equity stake of about 7–7.5% in SpaceX at a valuation of roughly $10–12 billion.
Original HN thread, 11-years ago (220 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8914956
"It's quite amazing how this values SpaceX at 10bn, less than 50% of WhatsApp."
Somebody was wise a decade ago.
Maybe hacker news is wrong and SpaceX is actually valuable.
For what it’s worth, I get it. I have found Musk insufferable for the last decade since he attached himself to the right and got into drugs, however I think SpaceX is undervalued right now.
1. They are literally the only company on earth with a reliable partially reusable launch system. There are a few people trying, but everyone else is way behind.
2. When they eventually (hopefully) get Starship right, we will see a price drop in the cost of transportation to orbit we have never seen. When I did the numbers a few years ago, the price for space mining to be comparable to terrestrial mining was around $20-60/kg to orbit. They’d effectively be the ONLY way to access that. That’s one of a gazillion things that becomes possible with cheap access to space. UPS becomes a competitor at those prices… it’s game changing.
3. They are basically dominating the satellite internet world. Nothing compares. Starlink is amazing, especially here in Alaska, I suspect they will eventually have a phone, which will be revolutionary.
4. A gazillion government contracts, Star shield, and arguably point to point QRF shuttle (after starship). The defense implications alone mean that they are going to be around indefinitely.
I don’t know, but I think people are sleeping on this.
This investment has never been secret. Google (now under parent company Alphabet) invested roughly $900 million as the majority of a ~$1 billion funding round alongside Fidelity Investments. This gave Google an initial equity stake of about 7–7.5% in SpaceX at a valuation of roughly $10–12 billion.
Remember this was also when SpaceX was actually about space, instead of mostly AI and Twitter. Long-term shareholders that were sold on the space, have to be thinking about how to get out once their lockups expire.
Seems similar to me as when Eric Schmidt resigned from the Apple board many years back because their products started to overlap, especially mobile.
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SpaceX had adult leadership for a long time. I suspect there was a tacit agreement with Musk about a bit of separation. He broke through that professional firewall when he merged xAI with SpaceX and then pushed it to go public as he did. I also posit that Gwynne Shotwell is weirdly undervalued for what she's accomplished and what she's put up with, and I think that will show up some time in the future. There was enou…
"succeeding despite Elon musk" is, however, a skill set applicable at only a (strike)small number of companies (/strike) single company.
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I don't think anyone is arguing SpaceX is actually valuable, just overvalued and the repeated recipient of obvious corruption.
Which corruption exactly? NASDAQ giving them fast entry so the biggest IPO in history is done on NASDAQ and not on NYSE who was also competing for it? Both are fighting for OpenAI and Anthropic listings as well which likely influenced their choice to get in early with SpaceX
EDIT: cleaned up my comment; removed a more inflammatory claim about corruption in the private sector.
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I don't think companies expanding their business should be the only reason to sell. Apple was a desktop and laptop computer company when they released the iPod. Nokia was a company making rubber products when they started making cellular equipment in the 1970s. Amazon was a ecomm company when they released AWS. Etc. Sure, I'm cherrypicking the success stories but I don't think it's the only signal people should use.
SpaceX had adult leadership for a long time. I suspect there was a tacit agreement with Musk about a bit of separation. He broke through that professional firewall when he merged xAI with SpaceX and then pushed it to go public as he did. I also posit that Gwynne Shotwell is weirdly undervalued for what she's accomplished and what she's put up with, and I think that will show up some time in the future. There was enou…
Gwynne is fiercely loyal to Elon. I don't expect to see significant strife between them.
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The companies you listed have great synergy with Google's core business. What's Google's play with SpaceX? Data centers in space?
Google Cloud, low latency cross-continental links, etc.