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SpaceX files to go public

nytimes.com

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Re: SpaceX files to go public

#321

Post by marcus_holmes »

keeda wrote: post #295
indoordin0saur wrote: post #113

SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced intern…

Their technical accomplishments are doubtlessly notable, but does the expected business growth justify this valuation? Honest question, how many things do we really need to send up there that reducing the cost to orbit by 100x will trigger Jevon's paradox and lead to 100x more launches? I suppose "data centers in space" is the current answer but again, I'm suspicious about its feasibility. Barring that, until we have…

Personally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society.

We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust.

Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareholders is an increase in share price, effectively speculation rather than dividends as the method of returning value to shareholders. So we're incentivising companies to be constantly pushing their share price up (rather than paying decent dividends), which does bad things to both the company and the economy as a whole.

It's not how the system was intended to work and we find ourselves on a treadmill of constant growth that is killing everything good.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#322

Post by bandrami »

manquer wrote: post #50
jordanb wrote: post #15

You don't have to believe. If you have a 401k you will be an investor 15 days after launch. The IPO will go great, because the company will float a fairly small issuance. The big shareholders will not immediately sell. They will hold on and maybe even buy to support the price. Then, after 15 days, it will enter the indexes and everyone's 401k will start auto-buying this stock. You might say this is an obvious flaw in…

>float a fairly small issuance SpaceX are widely reported to be planning to raise $75Billion in new capital. It may seem small a % for the valuation target. However that is about 3 times previous highest raise of $29B when Saudi Aramco went public few years back. The market simply may not be that deep[1] There is a good chance this one becomes the Wework of this decade. The valuation, amount being raised, cooling int…

> excellent salesman of vision when fundamentals are weak

Wow that was a polite way to say that

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#323

Post by isueej »

tristanj wrote: post #225

I'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation. SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. I…

[dead]

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#324

Post by tristanj »

themafia wrote: post #317
tristanj wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's a fake quote and not at all related to anything I wrote.

It's not a fake quote. It's an extreme distillation of the apparent core of your argument. It's how it appears to me. It's related to what you wrote in that someone read it and came away with that conclusion.

cool, and adding the part how "they don't literally kill anyone through an accident" invalidates your argument. that's a fake quote.

you can respond with actual substantiative points, but don't make stuff up.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#325

Post by grtt »

tombert wrote: post #289
tristanj wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the British colonization and funding of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia profitable? All three colonies were not profitable for decades after their formation. Yet looking back, colonialism was probably the most profitable venture ever undertaken. All three of them ended up becoming key allies and instrumental trading partners. Think on a longer time scale.

I'm pretty sure that Britain actually had pretty specific goals of profitability from the get-go.

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Re: SpaceX files to go public

#326

Post by pilgrim0 »

ericd wrote: post #220
pilgrim0 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a synonym for impossible. As far as the latest serious analyses have shown, data centers in space are a pipe dream. Starlink’s total addressable market was also shown to be way smaller than expected. The IPO in this case just signals they’re desperate for liquidity and with no clear path to profitability, if you discount unlikely, major breakthroughs happening very soon. They’re changing the rules of stock i…

Could you link to those serious analyses? The ones I've seen don't portray it as a total impossibility? Scott Manley did a runthrough that seemed reasonably positive on the possibility.

Try this one. You need to parse the hard data from all the speculation. So draw your own conclusions.

https://www.aravolta.com/blog/datacenters-in-space

As it stands, most if not all institutional and journalistic research around this topic I would consider compromised because they’re in some way or another financially interested in this becoming the next big thing. Aravolta included. That’s why most articles will counter each hard constraint with a handful of hopeful speculations.

As for pure scientific analysis, like the Scott Manley one, they tend to entertain themselves too much with the physics and mathematics and forget the economics behind it all.

Take Google’s own paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468) that estimates that launch costs, just to roughly match data center energy costs on earth, would need to reach 200USD/kg, which requires a 10 fold cost reduction relative to the current launch costs of Falcon 9. And that is to launch a _disposable_ server into orbit, that will disintegrate after a few years and likely have hardware failures well before that.

And these servers are not anything like a “data center”, and they won’t run the applications that we are already scrambling to find demand in earth. No, these would theoretically run some ultra-niche, highly experimental workloads maybe for NASA or the military. That alone can’t possibly justify the investment, at least not for the retail investor that actually expects a positive ROI. Nevertheless the tech elite and their pet journalists are more than happy to sell this fantasy to the average people.

Hell, I’m still waiting for Project Natick to materialize, Microsoft’s data center on the ocean, which makes far, far more sense than data centers on frigging space. Still they didn’t manage to make that one work in any meaningful sense.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#327

Post by tristanj »

isueej wrote: post #323
tristanj wrote: post #225

I'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation. SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. I…

[dead]

Elaborate?

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#328

Post by runako »

sublinear wrote: post #309
irishcoffee wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time. No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.

Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much. I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people. I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly push…

As an adult working in tech in the 90s, Google hit the Internet like a bomb. They were a relatively late entrant, long after most people had their favorite 2-3 they used (I was primarily Altavista). There was word of mouth, but search engines advertised heavily to raise awareness.

Then Google hit. Materially every person who used it stopped using their previous favorite search engine within 1-2 uses. It spread like wildfire. It was fast, accurate, and the results weren't cluttered (aka lightweight, aka friendly for people on dialup). Some competitors at the time were showing display ads on search results pages.

Google did not have to advertise that I can recall. It was like one day, search was like the auto market : lots of makes, types, etc. The next day it was all Google. It happened really fast in my recollection.

And to your point -- as far as I can recall, the big competitors simply did not try to clone Google. They kept their cluttered pages and did not optimize performance. Excite pivoted to home Internet via a merger with @Home.

A couple of close analogs you may have seen up close. AWS for having a lane virtually to themselves for a long time. Azure & Google & IBM etc. didn't really even suit up until AWS was entrenched reminds me of Yahoo! etc. sticking to their portal strategy well past its sell-by. ChatGPT for the speed of adoption. Google was like a combination of these two.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#329

Post by marcus_holmes »

sublinear wrote: post #309
irishcoffee wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They absolutely succeeded because they had a better search engine. Without a doubt. I imagine there’s more than a few folks around here who used shit like askjeeves, altavista, et. al. Google was heads and shoulders better than those, and continued to get better over time. No, I’m no Google fan, but it’s revisionist history to say they didn’t have the best search engine.

Hah. I didn't expect to get downvoted this much. I'm not trying to rewrite history either, but this makes me wonder how deeply the Google lore really affected some people. I'm in my late 30s, so fair enough. I was there, but not really "there" to see what happened. My understanding and memory was that there was good word-of-mouth in the 90s because it was marginally better. By around 2000, the media was strongly push…

I'm older, and was there.

The word of mouth was real. I was working in tech at the time, and had Google recommended to me by a mate. I tried it, and it rocked. This would be about 1996, I guess, somewhen around then.

Every techie converted to Google, and we converted our friends and family. Sure they got media coverage, but remember at that time journos had very little clue about tech and relied on their techie friends and family for tips about what was going on. And, obviously, the internet was the big story at the time. I would absolutely not be surprised if it turned out that Google paid nothing for media coverage and were fighting off journos clamouring for interviews.

As far as I'm aware, PageRank was a completely unique innovation that no-one else had done or tried before. There may have been imitators, but they never got the traction that Google did.

By 2000, and AdWords and all the rest, Google was already the dominant search engine, at least with tech folks. SEO was just beginning around this time, because of that dominance.

And yeah, Gemini is an also-ran, despite all the money and tech expertise Google have thrown at it. It'll be interesting to see if they cancel it, like they have other products that have not done as well in the market (G+ being the classic case). Same for Meta (and, well, Meta).

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#330

Post by 7e »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #113

SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced intern…

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