Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You're projecting. Byfåne.
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SpaceX files to go public
471–480 of 631 posts
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#472SpaceX 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…
The jury is still out on Starship. And also a bold claim to say that SpaceX by itself has reduced the cost of a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10. Did it play an important role in that reduction? Sure...
Who else “played a role” in Falcon 9 reducing the cost of mass to orbit, exactly ? I guess some public money went their way ?
Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ?
The achievements of the program so far and the infrastructure currently under construction in Starbase and the cape are seriously impressive. This is no speculative, skunkworks endeavour.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
You will have a setup working based on solar energy and battery storage before you get spaceship to not explode anymore and to deliver low price for payload.
And we are talking about AI Datacenters, they are a lot less latency dependend than websites.
Alone the idea that Musk would be able to break through any burocrazy for space stuff and sets up a supply chain for everything space is easier than just setting up some energy and fiber, feels ridicoulys
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to watch him a lot, but he started talking about AI (I work at a big lab) and it was all wrong, so I'm not sure if I can trust his analysis anymore :(
Unfortunately it's kind of impossible for a YouTube to make weekly/bi-weekly videos that are actually in-depth to an expert level. The best thing you can do is interview experts, but even then, everyone has their own biases.
*YouTuber
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#475Earlier 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'd be very surprised to hear that nobody else ever thought about setting up a scheme with Markov chains to measure "link juice"
I think google's thing was that they got the idea, the math, and the way to do it in a practical way at scale.
I'm a bit older than you and I remember when google came out and it was so far ahead of the competition it was unbelievable.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if you make the argument that it will replace terrestrial networks and that's why its worth X trillion $ then yes, you do actually need to cover the 1% of earth surface where the waste majority of people actually spend most of their time. The question is not if its a good business, the question if its a 2 trillion $ business, and if you only cover the 95% of earth without coverage. That more like a couple 100 bi…
I never said it would replace terrestrial networks... you invented that claim yourself and are responding to a strawman. Starlink mobile is for rural areas, and the other 90% of the planet that's not well served by traditional terrestrial networks. And 40% of earth's population live in rural areas, so there is a large market for this kind of service.
If its a big market, SpaceX will have to share this sooner than later as plenty of others are working on this.
Nonetheless even in rural areas there is A LOT of coverage.
And starlink has one sig issue: its bandwidth.
For them to increase bandwdith they need to scale which is expensive and they have to reinvest every 5 years in replacing these satelites.
A fiber layed down can work for a lot longer and can be replaced a lot easier.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
$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.
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
I have a bachelor from a school of business and I have no clue.
What did you read that worked?
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But why? We’ve not colonised either of the poles of our own planet in any real way out of a sense of prestige. Heck there’s huge areas in Canada and Russia uninhabited and these are all a dream to live in compared to Mars. Turns out the real overpopulation is in places people want to live.
I think the prestige, overpopulation, and pollution arguments all suck. The important differences are that the poles are not political free-for-alls that people can just colonize, and everything is still 1g vs. Mars' 0.38g.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
People have been speculating on future returns since forever.
The East India company (an example of capitalism gone very very wrong) was speculatively founded with £4m (in today’s money) and went on to corner half of global trade.
This rose-tinted past of honest capitalism did not exist.
Re: SpaceX files to go public
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines back in the day. Based on Starlink's revenue doubling year on year, and a six fold increase since 2022, I don't think anyone really knows what the upper bounds for global access is yet. And traditional telcos are usually limited to a region whereas Starlink is global. Just the top 20 global telcos alone are almost $2 trillion in market cap and $1.35 trillion in…
>They said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines Did they? I don't really remember that tbh.
They did. I worked in telecommunications from the late 90s until 2016. The death of the landline and dominance of mobile was a genuine surprise to the industry. The iPhone was the knockout blow.