Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

matteast.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–219 of 219 posts

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#211

Post by MPSimmons »

cycomanic wrote: post #95
MPSimmons wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX's entire history is full of, "there's no way they'll ever do X", followed by them doing it. They definitely haven't hit all of their goals, but I don't think anything they want to do is impossible, just really difficult.

Like what? Seriously, nobody thought shouting rockets into space was impossible. Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible. Sure they brought down prices, again nobody thought it impossible. The question is actually is it desirable. Rocket launches are pretty much the worst one can do in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but somehow all technerds are falling all over themselves how great it is.

I didn't say people claimed it was impossible, I claimed that they said SpaceX would never do it. And that's _still_ a pretty common claim.

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#212

Post by amluto »

olyjohn wrote: post #190
kilroy123 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But now there's massive opposition to building on land. If you just build in space no one will be able to hold up those permits. For what it's worth I don't disagree with you. This depends on ridiculously low costs to orbit. But there truly is unlimited power up there from the sun.

This is exactly why Starlink is successful. If we had decent regulations, and had actual good internet on the ground, why would we bother going to outer space? The truth is that it's cheaper to build an ISP in space to work around the corruption that has kept all these monopolies in power.

I disagree.

Regulations or not, building a terrestrial network is expensive. Once all the permits are granted, it still costs on the order of $5/foot ($25k/mile) to buy and install fiber. (Cost varies with labor costs and by installation type, obviously.) And you need backhaul, multiplexers or switches, etc.

In a fairly dense area with a lot of customers and proximity to existing transit providers, fiber is very cost effective. In a rural area with long last-mile links and few customers, fiber is more expensive and satellite can win.

Starlink has another potential issue in dense areas: limited bandwidth. The beams from satellites that are near each other can interfere with each other, so doubling the number of satellites may not double the aggregate bandwidth available in a given small, densely populated area. In contrast, fiber scales better than linearly up to huge bandwidth: installing 10 strands of fiber is much less than twice as expensive as installing five strands, and the bandwidth available per single-mode strand has been increasing over time without any requirement to use fancier fiber.

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#213

Post by nozzlegear »

shimman wrote: post #171
nozzlegear wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit: damn, if these designs are hated what modern approaches do people like? I feel like scroll based text is a relatively unexplored idea compared to the typical blog post. The New York Times generally does the "lots of data, text and graphs in a scrolling presentation" tastefully.

Any articles that demonstrate this? Haven't read the NYT in like 15 years. Only vaguely familiar with the data viz that Mike Bostock created while there, and only because he shared them on a defunct blocks site.

This is a great one, though quite old: 342,000 Swings Later, Derek Jeter Calls It a Career (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/14/sports/baseba...)

Another good one from 2025: Who Sits Where In Trump's West Wing (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/21/us/politics/w...)

And one more from 2025: ‘He’s a Maximalist’: Inside Trump’s Gilded Oval Office (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/23/us/trump-whit...)

They have a page where they've cataloged all of their interactive and visualization articles for 2025 here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/22/us/2025-year-...

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#214

Post by mlyle »

andruby wrote: post #207
ai-x wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you looked at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft valuation around 2007 (before the crash), you'd asked the same question about the large base. But here we are.

* GOOG's revenue grew from 16.6B in 2007 to 402B in 2025 for a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 20.4% * AMZN: 11.7B to 717B = 24.8% * AAPL: 24B to 416B = 18.6% * MSFT: 49.7B to 245B = 10.2% SpaceX is claiming they will grow by 41.5% !! That's double GOOG's growth and 4x MSFT's growth.

And claim they will keep bigger margins, despite needing to do all kinds of infrastructure stuff.

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#215

Post by scottyah »

samtp wrote: post #88
scottyah wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the entire predicted value that the company will be worth is like 6mo of the US budget (>$7 Trillion per year). I don't think that's all that much, even if they accomplish half of what they're all trying to do. The economy is already F'd because so few people are actually working productively- it's been a laptop-class driven economy since the 80s.

You don't think one company being worth half a year of the biggest country in the world's budget is all that much? Hard to know how to where to go from there because I find that quite insane.

You must be for extremely large government or very small companies. Governments aren't designed to be economic entities- they use pooled resources and redistribute but it's not like they're in the game to be profitable and expand. When the colonies got in an uproar over "taxation without representation" they were paying 1-1.5% income tax. I get that politicians need to be paid, the military needs funding, and some pooled resources at the federal level make sense over state and municipal, but the idea that an entity whose primary responsibility is to settle disputes and offer protection needs more money per year than the future forecasted sum of lifetime earnings of large swaths of workers who are literally doing the work to expand the economy to me is crazy.

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#216

Post by scottyah »

CursedSilicon wrote: post #77
scottyah wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've seen through Tesla that software, government regulation, and to a smaller degree build quality are the only moats against China that still currently hold.

Tesla build quality? Early Chinese EV's were a joke, but Tesla's aren't exactly built reliably either Once you learn how to spot their misaligned panels it becomes impossible not to

I've owned older USA made cars so a little panel alignment doesn't bug me. I like the lack of beer bottles stashed in the doors, missing screws, welds from the obviously inebriated, etc.

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#217

Post by scottyah »

mullingitover wrote: post #72
soperj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now SpaceX seemed to lose a big step when Musk got involved in DOGE. I don't know if key people left or what, but the pace seem to slow considerably, and the successes also seemed to come to a crashing halt.

Some principled people left when he made his big heel turn into openly promoting ethnonationalist authoritarianism. Pretty sure some other principled people stayed behind and are using the field manual[1]. [1] https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

This take is so exhausting, why do you refuse to do even a little bit of open-minded research or even not immediately resort to hyperbole?

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#218

Post by scottyah »

soperj wrote: post #63
scottyah wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the feeling that in 5yrs or so if China makes the yuan free-floating it will be more of a reserve currency. All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now, in the physical world as all other companies are getting very lazy or just working on software. Eventually it'll probably go the way of GE because humans are humans, but I think we have a few decades until more compelling place…

> All spaceX has to do is keep being as innovative and industrious as it is now SpaceX seemed to lose a big step when Musk got involved in DOGE. I don't know if key people left or what, but the pace seem to slow considerably, and the successes also seemed to come to a crashing halt.

Based on what? Most people moved to Starbase if you're tracking the hawthorne and redmond activity

Re: Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

#219

Post by soperj »

criddell wrote: post #202
soperj wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is the farthest down the line.

It seems crazy that AIs are doing all these impressive things yet struggles with something we teach children to do.

Not particularly. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 97. I don't doubt that these impressive things are very very similar to that.
Post reply on HN