361–370 of 631 posts
Patrick Boyle (fund manager, professor, youtuber) recently discussed this IPO on his channel. Informative and entertaining. https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE?is=TGpEdM2Y7sknP-cW
I wonder how many here are aware that SpaceX (not Musk) now owns X Corp. (nee Twitter), via its ownership of xAI. Smells like great fiduciary responsibility!
It could be a good thing as it is very diversified but it can also open the whole thing up to a lot of risk factors.
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> it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover In a nutshell: they're serving a market that has less money to spend using more expensive tech than the current industry leaders. Maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't scream "massive profit".
I think Airplanes are going to be pretty profitable. They are sort of running a market cornering operation there. But, there will be competition eventually. Starlink is way faster than the alternatives so most airlines have switched and Starlink has rapidly increased their prices for aviation. Idk if it's enough though, they are definitely running lots of promos for home customers.
> I think Airplanes are going to be pretty profitable.
Container ships, military vessels, even fishing expeditions could enjoy an internet connection and cell service.
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$16B is the top line gross revenue number. You don't count R&D as an expense per GAAP, so... They have claimed $8B in EBITDA, also leaving out the amortization of R&D costs. Those aren't audited numbers, as far as I know.
That article claiming $8b profit is indeed mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge custome…
90% of the valuation is about Golden Dome
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> SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if It’s funny, I hear the exact same phrasing used when justifying Tesla’s valuation. “It only makes sense if…” … if you ignore what the actual, physical business does today, and picture it doing something entirely different, beyond its current capabilities (robotaxis, androids, etc) The difference with this pie-in-the-sky ambition (Mars Colony) is that I don’t even understand ho…
My belief is that Mars will be colonized for ideological reasons, not for profit. A Mars colony won't be profitable. But it will be colonized, mostly for prestige, and also because of overcrowding & pollution, which will become bigger issues in the coming decades.
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A civilization on Mars would not create value. It would be a money incinerator. Mars is a shithole with nothing to offer humanity economically or in quality of life. Quite the opposite, in fact.
250 years ago, you could make this exact argument about the British colonization of Australia, and it would be entirely correct. The early colony was a pure fiscal drain on Britain with almost no return. Yet today it's the 13th largest economy on earth. Think on a longer time scale.
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As I mentioned at the end, if the pitch was just for the launch (and starlink) it would be an easy sell. The problem is launch market is not worth 1.5+ trillion though, you need much more than just starlink and all the satellites today to justify that . You and other early investors who had the opportunity to get in early may come of well in this and it was a good bet then. However it is hard to see why rest of us sh…
At current launch numbers it may not be worth 1.5+ trillion but valuations aren't about current, they're about discounted future cash flows. It seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower. Prices are quite extreme currently, a standard 3U cubesat (loaf of bread size) is $300k and that's just for orbit. There could be lots of startups that want to try robotic space mining…
discounted future cash flows is discounted by risk. There is a lot of risk on growing future revenue is the point.
>seems logical that there could/will be far more demand for launch if the price were lower.
This thesis hasn't played out much in the 10 years since Falcon landed in first 2015.
The non Starlink component of revenue has not massively grown beyond what size the market in 2015 to today. SpaceX isn't lowering launch price to induce demand beyond out being the cheapest just by enough, they would be going lower if cost was the only barrier for more revenue.
It not that businesses aren't possible there at lower launch prices. Starlink is testament that it is.
The problem is that rest of the world is not able to innovate fast enough to take advantage of it even after 10 years. The industry struggles with things like manufacturing satellites at scale or raising money for it, or executing on innovation etc.
What that means for SpaceX is that even if launch costs are cheaper than now, the launch market simply may not grow quick enough for the valuation number to make sense. They would need to enter a lot of new markets directly and be their own launch customer beyond Starlink. This comes with its own set of execution, regulatory and other risks. The data-center[1] in space play is an attempt to do this.
Either DC play or something else, they will need to find and sustain a large business to grow, maybe they will, maybe not.
It is not very clear now and that is a lot of risk so any future cash flow projection has to be discounted heavily.
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[1] I am not qualified to comment on the technical feasibility, however to analyze the company finances that is not needed, it is just one more risk factor, depending on how you feel you can assign 0 or 1 or anything in between.
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No related to this conversation, but I just started reading some books on finance and I actually know what most of those terms mean now! Lol
Good for you! It’s fun when you realize it’s a constructed language that also tends towards precision. While accounting is not my favorite, financial models as a whole are incredibly powerful reasoning tools. On par, for me, with engineering or physics based first-principles reasoning.
I'd always wanted to view affairs from a different lens, though I often feel the people who think everything revolves around bond rates or inflation numbers can miss the social picture of why things happen.
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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 shareho…
So of course we price businesses based on the expected long term value of the shares, as best as we can guess it. But the fact that a company degrades in value as it "overgrows", and engorges itself to become an entity that can't innovate or do anything efficiently in itself goes into the price too. It's not as if a place like IBM doens't want to grow: We just know they won't.
As for speculation rather than dividends, I suspect the real medium why this happens isn't just need for infinite growth: Again, as growth expectations slow down, price moderates: See Paypal vs Stripe. The issue is mroe of a principal-agent situation, as it's very difficult for the median shareholder to, say, force Zuck to stop spending money on the metaverse. And it's not just at the top level: We have a lot of incentives in organizations for people to push for more hires, even when there's very little value to be had. Anyone with a long career can see how much less tense a growing company is that one that has decided its headcount is stuck for a long time, or possibly shrinking.
Principal Agent problems are just much more annoying to put a blame on, because instead of being able to blame some exec all on their own, we get to look at ourselves too, and how what is good for us differs so much from what is good for employers too. The blame is spread thinly, and the behaviors that would lead to more efficient companies are also worse for workers. Then it's suddenly people easier to like, and we don't like where "try to be profitable at the most optimal size" takes us.
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What possible reasonable benefit would there be to datacenters in space? Why would that even be a concept at all?
Genuinely: regulation. Every other benefit is conceptual at best. If SpaceX controls the entire heavy launch market _and_ they control data-centers in space, then absolutely no one on earth is in a position to control or regulate such a data-center except SpaceX themselves. I'm not arguing that it's a good idea, but that is the idea.