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SpaceX files to go public

nytimes.com

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Re: SpaceX files to go public

#551

Post by DennisP »

johnbarron wrote: post #505
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…

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…

Those are a lot of great points but I'll nitpick a couple things. While it's true that Starship has never reached orbit, they have reached orbital velocity several times. They could have gone into orbit if they'd aimed in that direction, but they didn't because it's a test rocket and they didn't want it to stay up there if anything went wrong.

And I don't think the multiple failure causes mean they aren't iterating. They're making changes with every launch. It might mean that everything's a tradeoff, and a lot of times when you fix one thing, you create a problem somewhere else. Building a fully, rapidly reusable rocket is a really difficult task.

Something you didn't mention is that even on the "successful" flights they suffered some damage on reentry. They'll have to fix that if they want rapid reuse, which is essential for the super low costs Elon estimates.

I'm not sure what you mean by "never caught a ship" but they did catch a landing first stage with their launch tower, which was a pretty fancy trick nobody had tried before.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#552

Post by atombender »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #329
sublinear wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 frien…

Google became generally available to the public in September 1998, so you're probably misremembering the timeline.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#553

Post by runako »

ericd wrote: post #387
runako wrote: post #360

Earlier 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…

I don't understand how years spent building an orbital DC is better than years spent permitting. I guess maybe they expect to somehow be able to build these faster? (How?)

Anyway, is it technically possible? Yes. My suspicion is it's at best a wash vs building on the ground. Applying a similar price premium & similar engineering resources to a ground-based system is likely to deliver much more predictable results.

Tech obviously can have success at lobbying. The TikTok ban IIRC got 90 votes in the Senate. I'm sure the total cost of the required astroturf campaign was much less than launching a single orbital DC.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#554

Post by DennisP »

zulgin wrote: post #419
marcus_holmes wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Coca Cola indeed has a lot of value its market capitalization is USD 76 billion making it one of the 30 most valuable companies in the world! The problem with SpaceX is that its valuation is almost entirely driven by its expected future growth. For 2025 SpaceX reported EBITDA of USD 7.5 billion. Other mature aerospace companies (Lockheed, Northman, Airbus, Boeing etc.) are currently valued as ~19x EBITDA (i.e., Marke…

Someone else here pointed out that when your biggest asset is a network of thousands of satellites that all have a five-year lifespan, earnings after depreciation is unusually important.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#555

Post by Someone »

amoss wrote: post #450
damnitbuilds wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see lists of "Things Elon Musk will never be able to make money from, but did" and "Things Elon Musk will never be able to make money from, and didn't".

Cybertrucks. Electric semis. Full self driving. Battery city. I'll leave up to the reader to put them on the appropriate list.

I think Elon made loads of money from full self driving, without Tesla even delivering it once.

He personally might have made money on Cybertrucks, too.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#556

Post by netrap »

khriss wrote: post #377
plaidfuji wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Uh, how exactly would SpaceX make money from a Mars colony?

Getting goods and people over there, I guess..

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#557

Post by atombender »

sublinear wrote: post #162
riffraff wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true at all. I am confident some companies will make bank with AI. I am also confident xAI is not one of those. It's as if you said "if you don't think Lycos is a good business you don't think search engines can work in general".

I kinda disagree because while most search engines failed and Google succeeded, they did not succeed by simply being a better search engine. This is only further demonstrated by their excellent leverage of Gemini. Google continues to succeed at being Google.

As the other commenters point out, Google was absolutely a game changer. Their user adoption growth was stunning for good reason. Just a few months after launch, "everyone" was using Google.

That's not the whole explanation for their success, though. They could have cratered after that for all sorts of reasons. A large part of how they succeeded was the discovery of the ad model. A lot of people forget that ads were all manually negotiated before Google offered self-serve ad creation (Overture did the bidding system first, but Google was better).

They also starting building on "big data" very early on; AdWords reused the same tech that drove relevance ranking (PageRank and click-through feedback loop), so by the time competitors were scrambling to compete, Google had amassed tons of organic data that were only available thanks to their scale, and not something competitors could bootstrap.

But none of that would have mattered if the product wasn't good. I started using Google around 1998. The childish design was off-putting at first, and made me feel uncertain about whether it was a serious brand that would last — this was the age where new search engines appeared all the time (I used HotBot a lot myself) — but the search quality and speed was undeniable.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#558

Post by kortilla »

johnbarron wrote: post #505
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…

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…

>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.

Solid comment on the ISP business but this is straight up bullshit. They absolutely better have different root causes. That’s exactly what iteration looks like. Blowing up subsequent ships for the same problem would be incompetence.

Also the ship has very explicitly been held from an orbital trajectory to ensure predictable reentry in the event of no re-engine light. It’s very apparent from external analysis it was capable of the extra few seconds of engine runtime for an elliptical orbit.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#559

Post by mmmm2 »

DennisP wrote: post #551
johnbarron wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those are a lot of great points but I'll nitpick a couple things. While it's true that Starship has never reached orbit, they have reached orbital velocity several times. They could have gone into orbit if they'd aimed in that direction, but they didn't because it's a test rocket and they didn't want it to stay up there if anything went wrong. And I don't think the multiple failure causes mean they aren't iterating.…

I assume he means they haven't caught the orbiter.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#560

Post by moralestapia »

notahacker wrote: post #190
convexly wrote: post #120

I'm genuinely waiting to see at what the valuation lands at. The gap between what SpaceX charges per launch and what everyone else charges is so wide that the moat basically is the rocket. Hard to compare against anything even now.

That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though; costs have already fallen to the point where launch isn't the biggest cost of space hardware any more, the competition is hotting up, and whilst launch costs give Starlink an advantage over other LEO satcomms constellations, other countries have strategic incentives to underwrite the existence of that competition, and once those assets have been sent to space it's a st…

>That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though

Lol, the classic "I can build a reusable rocket in a weekend" comment.

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