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SpaceX files to go public

nytimes.com

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Re: SpaceX files to go public

#501
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey are absolutely not replacing “legacy” isps and certainly not mobile. Even if they had perfect coverage, sat signals are way too sensitive to obstructions.

No, but they are replacing bad ISPs. I have a relative in Brussels, while there is 10gig fiber on a nearby street, he's stuck on 100/10 coax, and to add insult to injury, Starlink is cheaper.

Coax is an old tech, but it is surprisingly innovative and pushed limits a lot with right equipment. Newest full duplex and extended spectrum models could potentially reach 10/10 Gbps and all they require is changing some passive splitters in the cable plant and RPD plus CM supporting new modulation. Which are way way cheaper than satellites.

What I'm saying, is as soon as there is a real competitor pressure, ISPs can upgrade their deployments in under a year or two, even without touching buried copper. Of course they can also choose not to do that too :) .

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#502
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but they are replacing bad ISPs. I have a relative in Brussels, while there is 10gig fiber on a nearby street, he's stuck on 100/10 coax, and to add insult to injury, Starlink is cheaper.

I mean your relative is maybe a member of the tech elite who needs amazing bandwith but 100 Mbps/10Mbps is not going to be limiting for most people. Coax is already pretty fast considering it probably takes its source from fiber at street level and mostly constrained in uploading. I just went from coax to fiber and I cannot tell the difference when browsing, streaming or sharing. Maybe it is because my devices are st…

You are quite right. Also in practice Starlink has random jitter and packet loss at unpredictable times, very visible when talking to my colleagues in Ukraine when they are on backups or in the country. It's fine solution, but landlines are for now superior. Also Starlink's bandwidth depends a lot on the majority of people staying on the landlines. Starlink is nothing short of miracle, but it has limitations. Interesting to see the if the v2 and v3 will upend the status quo.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds pretty niche. And airlines have already extremely thin margin (that have been eaten by fuel price increase). I wouldn’t be surprised if they drop that type of luxury

It’s another product for airlines to sell and make money off. It also serves to keep passengers entertained and content. It’s going to be a very strong market for Starlink IMHO.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> about discounted future cash flows. 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…

> This thesis hasn't played out much in the 10 years since Falcon landed in first 2015.

It did play out: there are many more launches today, it's 5x in 20 years. The 75% of SpaceX starlink launches (which account for nearly 50% of all launches) were quietly financed by their other launch customers, exactly because the real cost to launch dropped so much.

That doesn't mean you're wrong, but you do seem to forget that SpaceX, as its own customer, knows the number of launches is going to rise exponentially. They obviously choose to manufacture for where the market _will be_, while you don't see the market before its there. Which is good for them.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#505

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…

This comment reads like an S-1 pitch deck and almost every claim is false or misleading.

The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization.

For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business.

Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason...

And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported...

The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this.

Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-)

Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer.

And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit...

Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand ...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped.

See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling.

This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one.

Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is.

Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible moment, maybe minutes before the IPO? ensuring hype and retail commitments are fully baked, before anyone really looks at what the financials actually say.

It will be a wildly successful IPO. Same playbook as Tesla 2010, just with more zeros and fewer functioning prototypes.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Australia was built by forced and indentured labour.

I guess the unspoken part of a Mars colony is that it would be penal.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#507
post #295

Earlier 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…

The fact that capitalist systems require unbounded growth for "success" is the real society killer, but crazy valuations is definitely a concrete symptom of this as we reach growth limitations; we're now pushed to "just assume" that the growth is still plausible when it's clearly not to keep the status quo.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#508

Earlier 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…

Valuing anything by its expected, long term value is just accurate. You'd consider the longevity of, say, a garment when you purchase it. The fact that a car has a lot of miles in it, and therefore will need replacing earlier, is something that any reasonable person will consider with its valuation. We spend money educating children not because of the value of the knowledge that second, but the expected value in the…

When humans are involved the waters are pretty muddy and the forecasts of possible growth rosier than reality. Seeing companies losing money hand over first while those same companies get insanely high valuations is common enough that these are obviously short term money grabs before the house of cards collapses.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely no one said that.

There were a lot of people back in the early '90s who thought cell service would never be widely adopted because of the cost. It was clear you didn't need a mobile phone -- we'd all gotten long just fine without one.

I worked at Radio Shack in 1995 shortly after carriers started subsidizing phones aggressively and you could “buy one for penny”. They were selling like crazy.

Just some quick Googling says that cellphone penetration went from 1% in 1990 to 50% by 1999.

The Motorola Startec was introduced in 1996 and clones came quickly thereafter and were all the rage

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#510
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which airline? Airlines have been moving away from land based WiFi to much faster satellite WiFi for years
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