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SpaceX Is Raising $500M at a $30.5B Valuation
- sink_knob 8y agoHow much leverage is too much leverage? I guess we'll find out.
- walrus01 8y agoWell, it's not like they lack a working product (Falcon9 block5), market demand (commercial launch operators who were paying a fuckton of money to Russians or the ESA), or unique technology (landing on legs, re-used first stages). Even if it winds up in a debtor-in-possession or forced acquisition scenario I feel optimistic about the direction it's going as a whole. Webvan burned through approximately 1.2 billion and accomplished pretty much nothing. Quoting a case study of it from the mid 2000s: "Raised approximately $1.2 billion dollars from private investors and IPO. • Investors: • Goldman Sachs • Yahoo • CBS Inc • Knight – Ridder Co • Softbank Co • Benchmark Capital • Sequoia Capital. "
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoMusk is raising equity, not debt.
- raverbashing 8y agoSo if my friend pays me $10 for 0.1% equity on my lemonade stand is my lemonade stand worth 10k?
- SkyPuncher 8y agoYes, but good luck convincing the next investor of that.
- matte_black 8y agoIt’s not that hard if the lemonade stand has been pumping out at least $150/month in profit for the past year or two.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoRegardless, equity is not "leverage", and does not have the same risks.
- jeletonskelly 8y agoYou could point to that transaction for a 409A valuation.
- virgilp 8y agoIt is, according to him. The world may not believe him, but that's the statement he made. And he stands to lose up to $10 if he lied or misjudged it.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> that's the statement he made More fundamentally, valuations are a metric on stock price and shares outstanding. The latter, too, is a metric on a company’s charter, outstanding (and anticipated) warrant and option and conversion obligations, et cetera. The concrete quantum is the trade. Everything else is educated conjecture.
- elif 8y agohe doesn't have to believe it's worth 10k. he just has to believe that someone else can be convinced it's worth 11k.
- virgilp 8y agoRight, he doesn't have to believe what he stated - "lie" was one of the possibilities I listed. But you can't claim the gesture is meaningless.
- synaesthesisx 8y agoExactly. Take almost any tech startup (Uber for instance, is not worth anywhere near $100B but they've managed to convince investors otherwise)
- oconnor663 8y agoIt means your lemonade stand is worth 10k to your friend apparently. How many friends you got?
- Arnt 8y agoThat's precisely right. Because that valuation is the price someone was willing to pay, which makes it a better estimate than a "reasonable" number which isn't backed by anyone's actual willingness to invest at that price.
- empath75 8y agoAccording to that person, yes. You'd find out if it actually was, if you sold the rest of it.
- douglaswlance 8y agoAccording to your friend, yes. According to someone else, probably not. Companies (as well most all things) are only worth as much as people are willing to pay for it. When a company like SpaceX raises funds at a particular valuation, you can be sure that they have done a rigorous analysis to figure out what is an acceptable valuation for their target buyers.
- btian 8y agoYou just discovered market capitalization. Congrats!
- mkirklions 8y agoFmr believer here: Fraud and Employee abuse, I cannot imagine anyone(outside their cult following) who would trust an Elon project with their money.
- Kannu 8y ago8449654467
- Kannu 8y ago8449654
- codeulike 8y agoBear in mind that per-kg-to-orbit, the Falcon Heavy is 50 times cheaper than the Space Shuttle. edit: I think thats based on programme lifetime costs, if you look at incremental costs per launch its about 12 times cheaper -see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706930 edit: OK maybe not the best two things to compare (although the original vision for the space shuttle was that it would launch all US payloads, due to projected re-usability). But FH is still way cheaper than any contemporary competitors, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18706762 edit: I've been looking at old pics of the space shuttle and lamenting that its the only thing we've ever put into space that actually looked like a proper spaceship. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-13719297/unique-footage-of-endeavour-shuttle-docked-at-iss https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-13719297/u...
- rplnt 8y agoAre you including the Space Shuttle itself in the payload? Not trying to say Space Shuttle wasn't extremely expensive, but comparing two different things isn't exactly fair.
- ashtonbaker 8y agoDoes it matter if it's fair? The shuttle was used for ferrying things to space for decades, so it is kind of a relevant comparison.
- sonofaplum 8y agoNot the same type of things. Space X doesn't dock with space stations or repair telescopes, space shuttle doesn't launch commercial sattelites.
- Pfhreak 8y agoSpaceX docks at the ISS... (technically berths at the ISS).
- 8y ago
- jeletonskelly 8y agoWish I could find some SpaceX shares on the secondary markets.
- ascales 8y agoLiquidation events do happen every so often, but finding someone with the connections to connect a seller and buyer requires a strong network and a substantial net worth.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> Wish I could find some SpaceX shares on the secondary markets Unless you’re willing and able to commit at least $5 million (at the very least, $1 to 2 million) it’s not worth exploring. You’re better off buying some merchandise [1] and sticking what you were going to invest in some bonds or a broad-market index. [1] https://shop.spacex.com/accessories.html https://shop.spacex.com/accessories.html
- ascales 8y agoI'd even say that $5mil is on the low end of what would come up during a liquidation event. However, now there are probably more shares that have been bought and sold a few times, so there might be some more smaller investors willing to cash out.
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoLarge investors are comprised of smaller LPs. And early investors include early employees. That said, yes, most sellers are in the $15+ million size.
- drak0n1c 8y agoIt was available for $250k minimum previously via crowdfunding. Look up SpaceX on this page: https://fundnel.com/investor/deal-feed/funded https://fundnel.com/investor/deal-feed/funded
- gnopgnip 8y ago
- mabbo 8y agoWhile Musk has personally been a bit odd lately[0], SpaceX as a company seems to be in good hands with Gwynne Shotwell. They're launching very regularly[1], haven't had a customer-impacting failure in years[2] and they've got the market cornered. They have customers lined up for years, and continually make huge gains by reducing costs. They've got a head start by at least 5-10 years over all new entrants (Blue Origin, Electron, etc) and are massively undercutting the legacy competitors (ULA). If I could invest in SpaceX, I would. [0] I think he's overworked and burned-out himself out but can't recognize it. Who am I to judge- I've been there. [1] They were going to launch about 20 minutes ago actually, but scrubbed at the last minute. They'll probably launch it tomorrow. [2] Two failures recently were Falcon Heavy middle core doing a dive instead of a landing due to running out of igniter fluid, and the much-watched booster 'water landing' recently, where they fully recovered the booster afterwards. Both were successful launches.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bryanlarsen 8y agoHow do you say they have a 5-10 year advantage over Electron/Rocket Lab? They've already done a commercial launch and have 11 launches scheduled for 2019. They could very well be a viable competitor with a strong cost and time flexibility advantage in 2020. SpaceX has a huge payload advantage over Rocket Lab, but small satellites currently pay a lot of the bills at SpaceX...
- tzfld 8y agoElectron and Falcon 9 have have entirely different capabilities. Electron may be more flexible but it's unable to launch geosynchronous satellites, which are by far the most profitable in the launch industry.
- ChuckMcM 8y agoI was going to say something similar. I love Electron, they have an awesome rocket and have made it to orbit so they are winners in my book. That said, they are poking at a different market than SpaceX is, which is the small rocket, small payload to orbit. Yes it's a market, no it isn't particularly high margin (at this time, these tend to be cube sats with more modest budgets). What is worse, they still throw away the rocket once they launch. A "gas only" Falcon 9 rocket (which is to say they have the means to launch and relaunch over 10 times) is ultimately going to be the most cost effective path to space. Not sure Electron can get there from here.
- ArtWomb 8y agoSpaceX, UAL, Ariane and Blue Origin are all doing launches today. We really need a global manifest with updated real-time links to livestreams ;) GPS III SV01 Mission https://www.spacex.com/webcast https://www.spacex.com/webcast New Shepard NS-10 https://www.blueorigin.com/ https://www.blueorigin.com/ CSO-1 http://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-vs20/ http://www.arianespace.com/mission/ariane-flight-vs20/ Delta-IV NROL-71 https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/delta-iv-nrol-71 https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/delta-iv-nrol-71
- Pfhreak 8y agoThree of the launches have been scrubbed already.
- Klathmon 8y agoI use this website/app which is very well maintained, and even includes an API if you want to use it! https://spacelaunchnow.me/ https://spacelaunchnow.me/ It includes locations, payload information, launch company and rocket, links to livestreams, notifications for launch updates, and more.
- jesseb 8y agoI use spaceflightnow[0] to keep track of launches. Not always 100% up to date but usually updated pretty frequently, good enough for me. [0] https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/ https://spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/
- dr_orpheus 8y agoI have been impressed with how up-to-date Spaceflight Now is. I work in the satellite industry and once Spaceflight Now had an updated launch schedule before we actually got word from SpaceX that our launch was delayed.
- jesseb 8y agoYeah they do an incredible job, seem to have things before certain official channels do as you mentioned. The company I'm employed with works with Iridium, so I like keeping track of how the NEXT deployment is going.
- Already__Taken 8y agoIf the BFR happens they'll be unstoppable. Not because of what that rocket is but for building a company that's capable of producing something like that whilst operating a normal ongoing launch business.
- travisoneill1 8y agoAlso because of what the rocket is. The military will pay through the nose for the capability to launch a constellation in days.
- tastyfreeze 8y agoJust the military? That kind of capability completely changes the business yet again.
- evo_9 8y agoFor the laymen such as myself what do you mean by 'launch a constellation'?
- lightbyte 8y ago>A satellite constellation is a group of artificial satellites working in concert. Such a constellation can be considered to be a number of satellites with coordinated ground coverage, operating together under shared control, synchronized so that they overlap well in coverage, the period in which a satellite or other spacecraft is visible above the local horizon. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_constellation
- mikestew 8y agoIn addition to sibling comment, a real-life example is the GPS constellations. A single GPS satellite won't do you any good, but two or three (or better yet, six or twelve) will pinpoint your location. So the US DOD, et. al., threw a bunch of them up there at once instead of just one. And perhaps not just the military. Iridium wants to replace their constellation of satellite phone satellites? Is next week okay?
- myroon5 8y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20181218151517/https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-spacex-is-raising-500-million-in-funding-11545142054 https://web.archive.org/web/20181218151517/https://www.wsj.c...
- robhunter 8y agoEvaluation?
- qnsi 8y ago30.5B
- WhompingWindows 8y agoI think he's saying the word is "valuation" not "evaluation"
- copremesis 8y agoNah, He meant a 30.5 Billion checkup at the doctor's office ... I wonder who his insurance company is?
- sctb 8y agoOK, updated.
- czottmann 8y agoDe-paywalled article link: https://outline.com/dNX9E4 https://outline.com/dNX9E4
- copremesis 8y agoThat's one very expensive doctor's visit!!!
- copremesis 8y agohttps://i.imgur.com/vGQCgWo.png https://i.imgur.com/vGQCgWo.png (original title after editing) 1st thing that came to mind ... they edited their typo and now I get downvotes
- sk_hazratali 8y agoThanks for the information. https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2018/12/imdad-kun-imdad-kun-lyrics.html https://www.sherekhudahazratali.com/2018/12/imdad-kun-imdad-...
- abadd0n6w 8y agoHow do you read the wall street journal articles for free?
- erikpukinskis 8y agoPuts Elon's net worth at around 27 billion! TSLA 59 B * 19% = 11.21 B SpaceX 30.5 B * 54% = 16.47 B Total: 27.68 B
- AndrewBissell 8y agoEike Batista got up to $35 billion (on paper), just before he went belly up.
- pslam 8y agoValuations like this always remind me of this meme which went around when 37Signals had an absurd one of their own: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-... $500m sounds like a lot, but the 60:1 ratio says to me that the investors aren't confident they're getting their money back.
- dwaltrip 8y agoPerhaps SpaceX didn't want to sell more than 1.6% of the company at this time, or doesn't need more than $500 million.
- yalogin 8y agoCan someone knowledgeable chip in on how effective a satellite based broadband network will be? Will it have enough throughput? How future proof will it be? How are updates/upgrades done?
- Klathmon 8y ago(This is all from memory as a fan, so take it all with a grain of salt and please correct me if i'm wrong on anything!) So Starlink (the name of the network SpaceX plans to build) is different than most other satellite internet projects. While most try to put their sats in GEO orbit (which is about 35,000 km above the earth), Starlink is going to LEO (their sats are planned to be from roughly 350 km to 1,500 km above the earth, those numbers aren't typos). Starlink is also planned to have multiple orders of magnitude more sats than any other network (mostly due to the lower orbit, since lower orbits must move "faster" relative to your position on the ground, each individual sat may only be within signal range for a short amount of time). The latency from a "normal" GEO internet sat is on the order of a second or so for a round trip, the latency for a Starlink sat is expected to be on the order of 100ms for a round trip! They even have some plans which show that it can have SHORTER latency in some cases than ground-based communications! Throughput is still yet to be shown entirely, but with such a large number of sats which all communicate between the others around them at any given time, and some clever routing algorithms, they should be able to get a worthwhile amount of throughput from the system. As for future-proof-ness or updates/upgrades, the path is pretty elegant if not a little crazy sounding. Their plan is to just let them deorbit on their own after some time (I believe on the order of a year or so), and constantly replace them with new sats by leaning on the cheap launches that their rocket tech provides. Since the sats are in such a low orbit, the natural drag of the atmosphere will slowly pull them down over time, and I believe they also have self-deorbit capabilities. This solves the issue of upgrades (don't upgrade them individually, upgrade them as a group over time!), and future-proofing it with those upgrades (as the tech improves, so will the constellation over time!) Hopefully this wasn't too rambling and difficult to understand!
- brandmeyer 8y agoTheir are some downside risks to this endeavor. For starters, there is a low utilization factor for each satellite. Humanity is concentrated onto a fairly small percentage of the Earth's surface. Earth's radius is about 6400 km, so at that low altitude you can only get so much out of pivoting your antenna's towards populated areas. Each satellite will be spending much of its time without any users (oceans and deserts), or with very few users (rural areas). Second, there is a belief that the next billion new Internet users are going to be mobile users. So the market size of satellite Internet isn't "all the people that don't currently have Internet," its much smaller than that. In the developed world, Internet access is frequently bundled with other services, so the potential pool of flexible customers that could be wooed away from their current service isn't that large, either. Finally, eventually the folks digging ditches are going to catch up. Once fiber gets to your premises, it will be much cheaper ber byte than satellite Internet. It doesn't matter how the last mile is traversed. Even if its fiber to an LTE tower, it'll still be cheaper per customer than satellites. I could be wrong about the economics. Presumably they've done the numbers, and the plan still closes to profitability. SpaceX isn't the only one perusing it, after all. Nevertheless, I think there is also reason for skepticism.
- mettamage 8y agoI wish I could have invested. Does anyone know how to do it?
- ineedasername 8y agoThis increase in valuation doesn't really seem justified, at least based on what's occurred since its last one. It is roughly a $3 billion increase but SpaceX has underperformed its targets for 2018. It had a target of 30 launches this year, and has only seen about 20, roughly the same as 2017.
- martythemaniak 8y agoPeople who think Musk is eccentric/unhinged/unstable/etc should consider a much simpler possibility: He's just a regular guy, and simply does not filter himself like his peers do. Other people in his position adopt the public/private persona and for the most part just plain shut up. They don't tweet anything than platitudes, they don't joke, they don't speak with random people on Twitter. They probably do this to minimize their downside exposure, but that might not be very effective. Bezos's bland Twitter feed hasn't stopped anyone from making into a villain. Musk OTOH, makes Monty Python references, fart jokes, strikes up random conversations, shittalks randos etc. Ie, things normal people do. So the downside is a deluge of tusktusktusking at his "unstable" behaviour, but the upside is that a lot of people like him because he comes across like a real person rather than a PR bot.
- FartyMcFarter 8y agoThere's a limit to how much this can be accepted though - he has broken rules before and this has consequences not just for him but also other stakeholders.
- emn13 8y agoUnderlying this perspective is an implicit assumption that conventional social filtering - a practice as old as we can remember - serves no social good; that it's all just smoke and mirrors. At the very least that's a remarkable assumption. We've been doing this for essentially ever, and it impacts all kinds of stuff. In some sense, musk is to CEO's what trump is to the presidency: all that diplomacy is just nonsense. And - perhaps there's a kernel of truth to that; after all, the way we communicate has changed more radically than I think we really like to admit. I don't just mean the technology and the means, nor the social fashions: just read (transcripts of) old communication: I think we really think differently now than a few generations back. So perhaps old norms no longer apply completely. But I'm not quite willing to assume that without at least some careful thought. I think it's at least as plausible that trump and musk (to be fair to musk: they differ in most ways, and trump is way more extreme) simply don't communicate very strategically at all. Despite all the hot air there's little upside; it's mostly mess. Sure, it's entertaining. And as entertainment, that's fine. But would you want to actually deal with people like that? And if the world has changed in many ways, what hasn't is that you're going pretty much nowhere alone. You need cooperation and help to amount to anything constructive. So: maybe there's a small chance this is the new norm and humanity has changed in pretty basic ways under the influence of todays pressures and technology. But there's also a considerable chance it hasn't.
- m0zg 8y ago$30B seems steep TBH. Consider that launch revenue last year was only $3B worldwide, and that's revenue, not profit. Granted SpaceX owns a good chunk of that, and their margins are the best in the industry, but with another player arriving at the scene soon their dominance could be short lived. OTOH, if their Starlink effort succeeds (a big "if"), and they capture a fraction of the global $1T internet access market, this $30B could be totally peanuts. But that requires some serious faith on the part of the investor. Still, though, if I could invest, I would. This is as close to "going to the moon" effort as it gets these days, I'd rather bypass the government money black hole and fund it directly. Elon, maybe run an ICO for this?
- tchen 8y agohttp://outline.com/dNX9E4 http://outline.com/dNX9E4