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A look into the finances of SpaceX

wsj.com

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Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#281

Post by bryanlarsen »

Fordec wrote: post #120
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…

In other news it cost me $1500 to do a year of grocery shopping trips while it cost $1500 for one transatlantic return trip holiday. Apples to oranges comparison. 400km to low earth orbit is not compatible to a 384400km trip to another gravity well.

It takes 9400 km/s of delta-v to get to LEO, but only 3260 km/s of delta-v to get from LEO to Lunar Intercept Orbit.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#282

Post by fnordpiglet »

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.

A “giant orbital bomb” is part of the Lunar Starship plan. Starship will launch tankers

> Starship HLS requires in-orbit propellant transfer in its mission profile. Prior to the launch of the HLS vehicle from Earth, a Starship variant configured as a propellant depot would be launched into an Earth orbit and then partially or fully filled by between four and fourteen Starship tanker flights carrying propellant. The Starship HLS vehicle would then launch and rendezvous with the already-loaded propellant depot and refuel before transiting from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

I’m a little confused why you call it a giant orbital bomb. It wouldn’t be particularly giant. Four reusable flights could only bring 600T of propellant to LEO. A single starship is fueled with 4600T of propellant, or 18400T of propellant to get that 600T into LEO. I would argue the starship itself is a much more giant bomb with all sorts of fire and stress and chances to explode. 600T of fuel exploding in orbit might not even be visible. But there’s been a number of tests of in orbit refueling and it doesn’t seem much more complex than, say, docking with a space station and transferring bags of mostly water without damaging them.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#283

Post by fnordpiglet »

swid wrote: post #198
pclmulqdq wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Falcon rockets can't get to the moon. You need a lot more fuel to do that. That's why SLS and Starship are both being developed.

Falcon Heavy is capable of going to the Moon or even Mars.

Technically so is falcon 9, but they can’t return and they have to be totally dry with no cargo, and definitely not a terrarium full of humans. Falcon heavy is even capable of going to Pluto. But it wouldn’t be a very interesting mission. More interesting would be launching unmanned probes.

Regardless, the plan is to use starships to build a LEO refueling platform and bring propellant for a lunar lander brought to orbit via a starship. Such a platform could also be used for Mars. It’s a much smarter move than trying to bring everything from earth in a single shot. And I can vouch for the sanity of the plan - I have almost 600 hours on KSP which makes me a bit of an expert ;-)

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#284

Post by lamontcg »

VHRanger wrote: post #229
lamontcg wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a growth company with high return on capital the worst thing to do would be to return the operating profits as taxed dividends or just sit on the cash or something like that. If you can grow the business then the best thing to do with those operating profits is to pump it back into expanding the business and the capital and capturing more revenue next year. You aren't losing money, you're building a large…

There's a difference between accounting profits and economic profits. Growing a company that loses on its unit economics (eg. WeWork) ought not to make founders rich

You're assuming that the only way for a company to not post profits is for all its margins to be flat-to-negative.

If the company has high operating margins and high growth then it makes sense to take those profits and reinvest in capital and R&D to make the company bigger. That is the definition of an efficient economic machine builds itself, and the way to a very good stock for the investor.

That is different from the pathological stock with flat operating margins which is growing on debt, spending $1 to make less than $1 at the margins and will only consume itself as it grows.

And learning to tell the difference between those two requires learning to read 10-K's, you can't just look at the net earnings bottom line.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#285

Post by angiosperm »

cryptoz wrote: post #96
justapassenger wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P/E is price to earnings, not revenue. SpaceX is insanely overvalued.

Some amount of the value baked-in assumes that SpaceX will earn money on any of the thousands of revenue sources possible in the creation and running of the first large-scale city on Mars. Maybe you think it isn't going to happen - and sure there is some risk (!) - but in the successful case, SpaceX should be worth many trillions. At least.

Hint: Starship cans are comically inadequate to support a martian colony. They might be just adequate to maintain a lunar outpost -- if they turn out to work at all. We don't even know if humans can survive, long-term, in 0.3g; zero g, anyway, is right out. Life in centrifuges on Mars would be even less fun than in cans.

If some follow-on vehicle were ever developed adequate to support a martian colony, and lunar gravity were to turn out to suffice, getting any actual value return from such a vehicle is hard to imagine. You might try to use it to support automated mining of platinum-group metals from asteroids, but it is far from clear how that could be made to work out. That it seems possible in principle is usually not considered a sound basis for investment.

Musk certainly understands all of the above. He will cash out long before it is demonstrated to all be a pipe dream.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#286

Post by TheAlchemist »

jandrese wrote: post #261
TheAlchemist wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's from the fact that the demand is falling and they need to slash prices to continue to sell. They benefited greatly from Covid price surges, but this is about to end. In a 'normal' year, they can't sell that many cars at the prices they did last year - let alone in a 'recession' year. I don't think their did any investor guidance about profits - I may be wrong though. Re factories - I don't think they are buildin…

You can download the investor report once a quarter from their website. https://ir.tesla.com/#quarterly-disclosure Deliveries are currently on track and each vehicle delivered is profitable, with a larger margin (18.2%) than any other major car manufacturer. This may not be true with the first Cybertruck deliveries later this year, but total number of delivered Cybertrucks will be tiny. Cybertruck deliveries should r…

There is no guidance in those investors reports.

About those large margins - yes, they are a bit higher than others, but it's not that much - and they appear much more price sensitive now. Thing is, they compare themselves to Ford / Toyota etc, while they don't sell nearly as many cars. A much better comparison is to the likes of BMW / Mercedes - but it doesn't paint the same picture.

Cybertruck deliveries are definitely not happening this year (unless we talk about <100 units for marketing purposes - much like the Tesla Semi deliveries start a year ago...)

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#287

Post by Veedrac »

justapassenger wrote: post #135
edgyquant wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s debatable when they have a huge majority of launch market share at this point.

They have huge majority of market that’s much smaller than their valuation, and isn’t growing anywhere close at the pace they predicted (if they didn’t burn their own money to lunch hundreds of starlinks, their growth in launches would be pretty flat). But anyway, op used P/E ratio to justify spacex valuation, in a totally wrong way. Their P/E ratio is in thousands (assuming there’s no creative accounting to show tha…

> if they didn’t burn their own money to lunch hundreds of starlinks, their growth in launches would be pretty flat

False.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aoRFnOFX_CzxTTOFLl8h...

Note that this significantly understates market growth because Amazon's 83 launch deal did not include SpaceX, as Starlink is a competitor.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#288

Post by Uzza »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #176
misiti3780 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You mean the guy that spacex has a created a dedicated handler team for to keep him from interfering with their work?

The only source for that is a single blog post on tumblr, with zero actual proof of anything stated in it. It's gossip at best.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#289

Post by Veedrac »

NovaDudely wrote: post #252
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.

1 to 2 orders of magnitude? ... Falcon Heavy launches nowadays run at approximately $40-70 million each. So you are implying that others cost minimum $400 to $4 billion per launch! I mean that is still 1/100th the Saturn V but SpaceX hasn't improved the overall costs that much. An improvement, yes, but no where near what they claim. This is really my only complaint about Space X. I wish they would stop trying to be t…

Falcon Heavy launches are not sold that cheap, though Delta IV Heavy, on the expensive end of commercial launch, did in fact sell around $400m.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#290

Post by TMWNN »

reso wrote: post #259
wmf wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they can book Starlink launches as revenue. Of course Starlink has >$1B of legitimate subscriber revenue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

I suspect that SpaceX is booking Starlink launches as revenue. My basis for this is that their launch revenue is growing much faster than their non-starlink launch schedule. We can't prove or disprove this though, since their financials are secret.

> since their financials are secret

Why do you keep making comments like this in this post, when the whole point of the post is that the WSJ's reporters have viewed (and have written about) confidential SpaceX internal financials? I mean, really.

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