I wonder if this ends up like Tesla - China copies it and makes it cheaper -
GG if not protected by huge tariffs/bans. It seems like US these days is just a testing ground for new tech that later scaled further and optimized in China. Are there any hard moats protecting SpaceX from that?
SpaceX files to go public
381–390 of 631 posts
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion? 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.
> Which financial models best describe reality in your opinion?
The most-powerful ones for individuals are the micreconomic mechanisms. Understanding how leverage, tranching and moving risk (and reward) across stakeholders and time, work, for instance. The necessary mechanisms and tradeoffs one must make, as well as the ones one should.
If you're looking for a formal model, it's the balance sheet. But not the accountant's. The financier's. Sources and uses, and uses and sources. Payments in, payments out. How do they balance over time; how do they change exposures to different layers of economic and legal control.
The primitives of these models are transactions and people. When you look through them, they're defining human wants and ambitions, faults and fears, patience and mortality.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#383Twitter going public again .... that will change the tone
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#384> Money raised from a public offering would most likely help SpaceX finance its long-term goals of launching artificial intelligence data centers into orbit, creating a colony on the moon and getting humans to Mars. These are expensive and unproven endeavors that may take years and billions of dollars to achieve. Oh my god. When a journalist writes like any of this is remotely plausible within “years” and “billions”…
I think it s more important to question their profitability
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#385SpaceX 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…
For many decades, the only way the commercial aviation business survived was carrying the mail.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Imagine valuing Google in early 2000s on its revenue and dividends. It would have nearly zero value, but if you bought then you knew it was going to be one of the biggest companies in the world. Only boring stable companies that have no growth like Coca-Cola make sense only valuing without further growth.
Agree, but Coca-Cola has plenty of value despite being "boring" and "stable".
The post I was replying to was saying that SpaceX had no growth and therefore little value. That's a mindset that sees companies as speculative assets that are only valuable if their price is set to change in a way that a speculative profit can be made.
SpaceX is making money and doing well, the business fundamentals are working out, and it is valuable because of that. If it turns into a boring, stable, company then that's a good thing - it's less likely to spend $10B of shareholder funds chasing some sci-fi pipe dream (instead of, say, spending $1B testing its assumptions first) in the hope of continuing to be valued as a "high-growth" stock.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're understating the permitting problem - it's a major reason for the very large/rapid price hikes on power in the PJM region, and the populist backlash against data center construction, including moratoriums on DC construction. The difficulty in getting new electrical generation interconnected in many parts of the US is one of the major marks in favor of the plan.
I'm not understating it. But I'm not buying the line that suddenly it's impossible to build industrial buildings in the US. I am realizing that there are thousands of jurisdictions in the US with wildly different permitting regimes, and then hundreds of other countries in the world that might be more welcoming. But let's say they need to stay in the US. Are DC operators offering to buy down utility capex costs so tha…
One Vera Rubin rack costs $3-7M and eats something like 600 kw, so you’re probably looking at more like 800 racks for that 500 MW DC. $100k launch costs per rack doesn’t seem too terrible if that’s what it works out to. I’m sure there’s a mountain of solar panels that aren’t included, though?
And it’s not that simple, building out power generation is very constrained, the interconnection queue is years long in many places, and the current backlog for new natural gas turbines is multiple years right now. Fixing the permitting isn’t impossible with some political will, but energy permitting reform is something that’s been bandied around for years in Congress and hasn’t made it across the finish line. EPRA almost made it at the end of last Congress but that session ended before it did. Hopefully it makes it this time, everyone should contact their congresspeople and ask them to support energy permitting reform.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Starlink becomes common enough on flights, I absolutely believe it will be a competitive disadvantage.
would you choose a flight that's $200 more expensive because it has starlink?
If I’m flying for work and Starlink is that much better, quite possibly. My wife’s experience with other in-flight WiFi providers has been quite poor, often to the point that it barely works. Having said that, neither of us has been on a flight with Starlink yet.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
if they weighted (fully) by float (perhaps the average float from the trailing 90 days to the re-balance) it would not be as easy to game. The Nasdaq is accounting for float, but not completely.
Aren't basically all the huge serious index funds float weighted?
Yes, the MSCI World and FTSE World that many broad ETFs and funds track are float weighted.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#390You 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…
Do the ETF managers have no discretion in determining when to buy? I was under the impression that they usually handle these changes to indices gradually even under normal circumstances.
They do, but one performance metric for these ETFs is tracking error. So they want to try to match the index closely.