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SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

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Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#61

Post by freemint »

marcusverus wrote: post #51
grecy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon has said numerous times Starlink will be split off into a private company, just as soon as they get a handle on what it's revenues are going to look like long term.

I saw that, and it struck me as odd. I was under the impression that Starlink was intended to be the cash-cow that funds the Mars colonization project. I suppose it'd make sense to IPO if he prefers cash "now" to future income, but colonization will be a major resource sink for decades. How will SpaceX fund the colonization project if they spin off Starlink?

Starlink will not be a cash cow but a cash sink that burns money to keep SpaceX busy. By having other people foot the bill SpaceX is getting most of the money from the endeavour via launch costs without losing any control of SpaceX.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#62

Post by freemint »

DennisP wrote: post #54
missedthecue wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boeing is worth $132 billion, but they also have a backlog of over 5,000 commercial aircraft, and a valuable defense business on top of that. They will likely have more profit over the next 4 quarters than SpaceX will do in revenue. I don't really think it's an appropriate comparison for SpaceX.

If you just look at what SpaceX does today, then definitely not. But Starship would drastically expand the market, and a full rollout of Starlink would turn SpaceX into a major telecom company on top of that. Both are far enough along to take into account for valuation.

Or it will absolutely tank the the market price as satellite projects are multi year projects and the demand will only grow slowly outside Elon selling launch slots to himself (Starlink).

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#64

Post by ant6n »

lm28469 wrote: post #44
aeternum wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you convinced by Starlink? There's a subscription business that should have great margins. It fits right in with the new remote work paradigm. Literally working from anywhere including the middle of the ocean is possible but only with Starlink. Other companies cannot offer enough bandwidth.

Then you have to think about how many people want to work from the middle of the ocean, or anywhere else other than where their family/relatives/community is HN is a bubble in a bubble, ask around, 99.999999% of the population will tell you they don't give a fuck about starlink and even less of a fuck about remote work and "digital nomadism".

> ... 99.999999% of the population will tell you they don't give a fuck ...

So only about 100 people on Earth care about internet connectivity in remote places?

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#65

Post by qayxc »

nexuist wrote: post #47
qayxc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're already the world's cheapest launch provider by a significant margin, and currently the only human-rated private launch company. True. But the market is tiny. There have been 114 orbital rocket launches in 2020 [0], 25 of which were SpaceX F9 flights and 14 of them were Starlink deployment missions. This means that currently, SpaceX is its own best customer with more than half of their launches being used t…

> Even if I'm being generous and grant them two private crewed missions per year, that's not exactly a multi-billion dollar business. Didn't each shuttle cost several billion dollars to refurnish in between launches? There will certainly be a market for this if SpaceX is capable of meeting the demand, especially in the near future as the ISS ages and the international community begins to build and man the next genera…

> Didn't each shuttle cost several billion dollars to refurnish in between launches?

No. The launch costs of the Space Shuttle include infrastructure and development cost. Original cost projections were based on up to 50 launches per year.

With an actual launch cadence of just ~3 launches per year, accumulated costs skyrocketed when distributed over all launches.

Another factor was the heat shielding, which didn't meet the requirements for fast inspection and maintenance due to its flawed design - a flaw that was addressed by Soviet Buran by the way. It remains to be seen whether SpaceX manages to get around this problem in their latest design.

> There will certainly be a market for this [...] and the international community begins to build and man the next generation of space stations.

Plural even? That's a bold assumption. Every commercial venture relies on incentives. There's currently only very little incentive to build crewed space stations.

There are basically only three major applications that ware known to benefit from micro-g environments: optronics manufacturing, growing natural organs, and tourism.

The first two have the same problem in that it only works out if mass production can be achieved. Otherwise getting raw materials to- and finished products back down from orbit is way too expensive for it to be economically feasible.

Tourism cannot be a mass market either. It's not just the price that makes it a very exclusive niche market, but also the medical requirements. William Shatner for example might be able to survive a suborbital hop with Bezos' space dildo, but wouldn't pass the medical exam for a full blown orbital flight, no matter how much money he'd pay.

Another factor for the tourism industry is maintenance and staffing. Even with 3 month crew rotations, the costs for just staffing a space station would be quite substantial. For reference, the crew-to-passenger ratio of luxury cruise ships is between 1.3 and ~4 [0].

Tourist space stations would be in that category, too for various reasons so I'd expect similar ratios there.

[0] https://www.aboutluxurycruising.com/understanding-crew-to-pa...

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#66

Post by dumbfounder »

GDC7 wrote: post #42
dumbfounder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am guessing you aren’t a big crypto investor :). You are making an assumption that the other investors are all rational and use the same criteria when buying stocks. That is becoming less and less true every day.

Well if that's the case we can all go home, welcome our quant finance overlords with grace and hope they are magnanimous towards us mere mortals. Reading other people's minds is not yet possible :( , for everything else there's AQR, RenTech and D.E. Shaw.

My point is that some stocks people are buying with their hearts and not as much with their brains. They believe in the future and they buy no matter what the price. Revenue multiples are not considered. Spacex will almost certainly be one of these stocks when it goes public.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#67

Post by DennisP »

qayxc wrote: post #65
nexuist wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if I'm being generous and grant them two private crewed missions per year, that's not exactly a multi-billion dollar business. Didn't each shuttle cost several billion dollars to refurnish in between launches? There will certainly be a market for this if SpaceX is capable of meeting the demand, especially in the near future as the ISS ages and the international community begins to build and man the next genera…

> Didn't each shuttle cost several billion dollars to refurnish in between launches? No. The launch costs of the Space Shuttle include infrastructure and development cost. Original cost projections were based on up to 50 launches per year. With an actual launch cadence of just ~3 launches per year, accumulated costs skyrocketed when distributed over all launches. Another factor was the heat shielding, which didn't me…

Hemodialysis costs Medicare $90,000 annually per patient.[1] Space kidneys could cost $500K and the government would probably still save money, especially if they're based on the patient's stem cells (or very close matches) so immunosuppressants aren't necessary.

Kidneys don't mass much. We don't need super-cheap launch to make space kidneys worthwhile.

[1] https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney/need/statistics

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#68

Post by nexuist »

DennisP wrote: post #67
qayxc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Didn't each shuttle cost several billion dollars to refurnish in between launches? No. The launch costs of the Space Shuttle include infrastructure and development cost. Original cost projections were based on up to 50 launches per year. With an actual launch cadence of just ~3 launches per year, accumulated costs skyrocketed when distributed over all launches. Another factor was the heat shielding, which didn't me…

Hemodialysis costs Medicare $90,000 annually per patient.[1] Space kidneys could cost $500K and the government would probably still save money, especially if they're based on the patient's stem cells (or very close matches) so immunosuppressants aren't necessary. Kidneys don't mass much. We don't need super-cheap launch to make space kidneys worthwhile. [1] https://pharm.ucsf.edu/kidney/need/statistics

Is this something we could start doing tomorrow? Do we already know how to make space kidneys and just need the space in space to do it?

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#69

Post by naveen99 »

missedthecue wrote: post #33
kiba wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being publicly traded means they're at the whim of short term investors.

Hacker News really really really seems to think the stock market is solely focused on short term results, meanwhile, Tesla is valued at $770 billion dollars because they maybe might create a valuable energy business sometime in the future. Other examples are Uber, DoorDash, Lucid Motors, etc... money losing companies with nosebleed valuations because investors believe in the long term.

you are severely underpaid for someone with > 2000 karma on hn. Someone here should offer you a better paying job.

Re: SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation

#70

Post by GDC7 »

dumbfounder wrote: post #66
GDC7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if that's the case we can all go home, welcome our quant finance overlords with grace and hope they are magnanimous towards us mere mortals. Reading other people's minds is not yet possible :( , for everything else there's AQR, RenTech and D.E. Shaw.

My point is that some stocks people are buying with their hearts and not as much with their brains. They believe in the future and they buy no matter what the price. Revenue multiples are not considered. Spacex will almost certainly be one of these stocks when it goes public.

that is the same as my point. You have to be able to read the emotions of all the other market participants
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