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SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

nytimes.com

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Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#291

Post by ufmace »

bluGill wrote: post #226
jimjimjim wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is completely not actual reality. it depends on who the investors/share holders are and the balance between lots of small investors and a few large investors. as long as investors see a way to make money out of the ceo (dividends or rock-star growth pushing share price up) they are happy. and all of that pushes thinking towards making targets for the quarter or year. and if it get's bad enough -> not enough mone…

You need both. A visionary alone needs the discipline that comes from having to choose which vision of many and finish it. A financial focused manager will never bet on any but the most obvious ideas and thus lose when someone else makes something work. Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. The least creative person has enough ideas to bankrupt even the biggest company if you start a team to implement them all as t…

Yes, and that sounds rather like Apple now

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#292

Post by ufmace »

Super_Jambo wrote: post #190
valuearb wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Kindle is good and Echo is great. Every other hardware product they've ever made has been complete dogshit, which is why the packaging for most of them advises buyers to set them on fire.

The newer kindles are kinda shitty for the consumer, much better for Amazon no doubt. The switch to touch screen and adverts all over your library & store is really jarring. So much so that my tech friends now just buy second hand kindle 4s when their old ones break. It's possible that library lock in will stop them migrating away from kindles when the supply of kindle v4s runs out but not I think certain.

I don't mind the touch screen. I very much do mind ads, but you can pay $20 more to not have any. If anyone says they don't like ads but isn't willing to pay slightly more money to not have any, then I have to question their sense of priorities.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#293

Post by ufmace »

sidlls wrote: post #212
rl3 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm neither an Amazon nor Bezos fan, but that ethos is something I respect. Rocketry isn't something you rush. Frankly I'm surprised SpaceX hasn't had more mishaps given the breakneck speed at which they operate.

The vast majority of SpaceX's current success is attributable to government funded research and experiments (the entire space program for the last several decades) and government funding (currently) that Musk is taking advantage of. They don't have more mishaps because the innovations they're undertaking are small relative to the existing body of research and experiment, and built on a solid foundation that already e…

I'm generally for private enterprise, and It seems rather questionable to me to say that everyone who takes any Government money under any circumstances is equivalent. Musk has indeed taken a lot of Government money, and more importantly IMHO hired a bunch of people who got their experience in space and rocketry at NASA, but does that make him more or less private than, say, Lockheed-Martin or the other usual contractors?

I would say that the aerospace companies doing cost-plus contracting for loosely defined projects with fuzzy requirements and no prospect for sustainable private operations are in a very different business than companies that do fixed-price contracts with the Government for specific services with an eye towards capturing a private market in the future. The cost-plus guys are IMHO government agencies in all but name, plus some fat paychecks and kickbacks going to a few connected people. The fixed-price guys are IMHO normal private companies that happen to contract with the Government for their normal profitable services sometimes. I don't think it makes much difference if the first business that funded initial development was all government contracts - the private market for launch services is real, and SpaceX has a plan for making a profit in it and is progressing towards capturing a solid market share in it.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#294

Post by gozur88 »

nabla9 wrote: post #290
gozur88 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is you can displace an entrenched competitor by putting in enough money to end up with a superior product? That seems... reasonable.

Not at all and you know it.

No, I don't know it. What do you mean?

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#295

Post by Retric »

BatFastard wrote: post #282
Retric wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the cost of failure and the benefits from winning. Fewer bets tends to mean larger bets which can pay off more.

Being the richest man in the world shows some level of success ;-) Also allows him room for a lot of failures.

Well, he also has his stock in a company with a P/E ratio of 257.38, that's one very large bet. Cranking up earnings is clearly possible, but Amazon is also showing signs of imploding as for example people simply don't trust fulfilled by Amazon to mean anything.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#296

Post by vidarh »

BatFastard wrote: post #281
vidarh wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, point them to Calibre. While I currently use the Kindle app to read my books, I have made it my "policy" to on each purchase ensure that I am still able to break the DRM and store a backup copy in a non-DRM'd format. The moment that changes, I'll stop buying Kindle books. Some purists would prefer to avoid buying DRM'd products in the first place (and I do when I have an alternative), but this is "second best"…

That makes incredible sense. What tool do you use to back up your books?

Calibre, as I mentioned [1]. I don't know if I should link directly to DRM removal tools here, but if you search for DRM plugins for Calibre they're readily available.

[1] https://calibre-ebook.com/

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#297

Post by samstave »

bluGill wrote: post #226
jimjimjim wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is completely not actual reality. it depends on who the investors/share holders are and the balance between lots of small investors and a few large investors. as long as investors see a way to make money out of the ceo (dividends or rock-star growth pushing share price up) they are happy. and all of that pushes thinking towards making targets for the quarter or year. and if it get's bad enough -> not enough mone…

You need both. A visionary alone needs the discipline that comes from having to choose which vision of many and finish it. A financial focused manager will never bet on any but the most obvious ideas and thus lose when someone else makes something work. Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. The least creative person has enough ideas to bankrupt even the biggest company if you start a team to implement them all as t…

This is what happened to LucasFilm/Arts... when Lucas left, the CFO got control...

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#298

Post by samfisher83 »

snarfy wrote: post #172
nabla9 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is exactly how you come to dominate retail business and become monopoly power online. Amazon's reference point is Wal-Mart. They are in ever expanding price cutting small margin business. Another good comparison in Microsoft in 80's and 90's. MS dominated over IBM, Apple and others several decades with sup-par product everybody hated by attacking and destroying potential competitors, not by improvin…

> They are in ever expanding price cutting small margin business. If you sink all of your profits into expansion, then on the books you made zero profit. If you made zero profit, you pay zero taxes. This is a common tactic with farmers. They use this year's returns to buy next year's supplies. If amazon stopped growing and suddenly reaped their profits, there would be a big tax bill to go with it.

This isn't how accounting works. You can't just buy a warehouse and expense it in year one. You have to depreciate it overtime. You can look at their FCF its about 10 billion. Their market is 50x of that. For comparison walmart is ~20 billion and they are worth half of Amazon.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#299

Post by nickik »

valuearb wrote: post #247
nickik wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody knows that BO is basically in. They string along the other engine to reassure the military.

ULA has one foot outside the launch business already. The BE-4 won't be ready for years. It's not inkkely ULA exits the launch business completely before it's ready, it's at a huge cost disadvantage even with the BE-4.

The Vulcan might not fly in 2019 but it will fly by 2021. ULA still has money coming in and it will get more government contracts for quite a while, at least until Blue Origin New Glenn flies, so that will require BE-4 anyways.

Re: SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

#300

Post by nickik »

valuearb wrote: post #228
nickik wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not behind the Raptor in development. The Raptor has test fired but only a sub-scale. BE-4 design is finished and should not change anymore. We don't know if it has been test fired or not, they are in the middle of the testing campaign and Blue Origin does not share that information. The first BE-4 will be done long before Raptor, and it will fly before.

The BE-4 blew up on the test stand a couple months ago when they tried to test it. It's not complete because they are likely redesigning to fix that. We know it hasn't had a successful test or they and especially ULA would be trumpeting it. The subscale Raptor was successfully tested nearly a year ago and is twice the power of anything BO has ever made.

Sorry that is wrong, the BE-4 did not blow up. A test of a component failed, problems like that are normal and they are still within the planed time line.

The idea that if the had success they would 'trumpet it' is simply wrong, this has not been true in the past for Blue Origin and nothing has changed.

Raptor might be further along now but we don't have the information.

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