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SpaceX becomes the second-ever unicorn company to reach a $100B valuation
- choeger 5y agoIt's such a shame this company is not traded publicly. I would be willing to risk a couple of thousand of euros and bet on them being successful in the long run. A company like this has nearly infinite potential for growth.
- killingtime74 5y agoYour sentiment is probably why they don’t need to list. Plenty of more easily managed private investors available
- jmole 5y agoGiven Elon’s history with the SEC, I wouldn’t expect that going public is high on his list of priorities.
- rvz 5y ago> I would be willing to risk a couple of thousand of euros and bet on them being successful in the long run. A company like this has nearly infinite potential for growth. Seems you are disregarding competition, regulations and lots of other unknown unknowns here. As for a hypothetical listing, the investors themselves are there to make back their investment. To do this, they sell 'some' of their shares for a profit. If they were to list, I won't be surprised to see the stock being heavily manipulated by the institutional investors just to catch the retail traders out.
- kiba 5y agoBeing publicly traded means they're at the whim of short term investors.
- bpodgursky 5y agoKinda... but Elon has a controlling class of shares that would maintain total control even after an IPO. Still a hassle and subject to shareholder lawsuits though.
- aquadrop 5y agoIt also creates incentive for short traders to create negative publicity.
- missedthecue 5y agoHacker 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.
- naveen99 5y agoyou are severely underpaid for someone with > 2000 karma on hn. Someone here should offer you a better paying job.
- speedybird 5y agoDon't fix what ain't broke. The strategy SpaceX is presently using seems to be working well. Changing strategies now seems like a bad idea.
- grecy 5y agoElon 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.
- marcusverus 5y agoI 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?
- freemint 5y agoStarlink 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.
- GDC7 5y agoAt a 100B valuation you'd be kinda late to the party. Non-SaaS, non-tech platforms and non-biotech companies have a really hard marketcap ceiling. SpaceX builds stuff in the real world, macrostuff with millions of moving parts, that's like black death for economic margins, they also aim to go into an environment such as space which is very hard and has slapped us time and time again. There is no convetional ROI for us up there, there maybe is in the form of artificial economics such as the morale boost that the country gets when a rocket goes up. But if that's the case the US could just push for having the Olympics every 2 years given that it sweeps the gold medals everytime. A 200k usd on a public SpaceX is a bet on Musk being able to convince people other than yourself that SpaceX is in fact a tech-platform a SaaS or a biotech.
- actinium226 5y agoI mean, technically they are every two years. Summer and winter.
- nabaraz 5y agoNo, you aren't. Revenue is projected to be 3 billion this year, projected to be 10 billion by 2025. You also get Starlink with it, which is valued at 10 billion by itself. At 10x revenue, it is valued similar to Facebook, Microsoft and Google.
- GDC7 5y agoEverybody is focused on revenue. Last time I checked the important metric in business is revenue - cost of goods sold If they are approximately the same you are just running a big operation, not a profitable business. And I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, being at the helm of a big operation feels great and gives the master of the ship a lot of meaning, but it's not a profitable enterprise. Even SaaS, bio-tech and platforms feel the pain and the anxiety every minute they spend without being profitable. Despite what the CEOs say, it's like being underwater, you can be optimistic about your ability to swim towards the surface, but still you got to get there.
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- tuatoru 5y agoElon has said repeatedly that SpaceX is his way of establishing a colony on Mars. Going public has an extreme risk of deviating from that goal in favor of more profitable activities. He won't do it.
- hyperpallium2 5y agoBut, really, how much is a planet worth? The moon hasn't been profitable.
- jayzalowitz 5y agoI think someone should set up a SPV to tokenize the spacex shares it has to offer it to people outside of the united states...that would be fun.
- Rebelgecko 5y agoThere's a few mutual funds that own SpaceX shares, it'd be interesting if someone bought those and just canceled out all the other companies (not super familiar with finance so I don't know how feasible this is)
- tiffanyh 5y agoDon’t forget Basecamp. They have a $100B valuation. https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-valuation-tops-100-billion-after-bold-vc-investment/ https://m.signalvnoise.com/press-release-basecamp-valuation-... EDIT: why the downvotes? Are people not getting this is a joke post by Basecamp.
- manquer 5y agoIn this case it is secondary sale between current investor and a new one. Even from a fundamentalz perspective they are doing really well. They control more than 50% launch market, just won a 3 billion dollar NASA contract, have huge cost advantage over everyone else, their starlink service is in beta with 100,000 already generating in 120 million revenue. This is not even including any future potential of starship etc. By any standards they are worth a good amount
- sschueller 5y agoIs this at all realistic at this point?
- DennisP 5y agoBoeing's market cap is $132 billion, so it's not obviously crazy. They're already the world's cheapest launch provider by a significant margin, and currently the only human-rated private launch company. They've started launching the second-generation Starlink sats, which transfer data directly between each other by laser. If they get approval for the full network, they'll have total bandwidth about equal to the entire internet today.[1] It won't be competitive in cities but it'll be great in lower-density areas, exactly where cable/fiber are expensive. That alone is worth a lot of money. If Starship with anything close to the turnaround they're claiming, they'll multiply the world's launch capacity by several orders of magnitude, drop launch costs by a couple orders of magnitude, and open up all sorts of applications in space that aren't affordable today. There's risk of failure but altogether I'd say all that's worth as much as Boeing. If these things succeed, they'll be worth a lot more. [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-with-lasers-and-gen-2-spacex-starlink-bigger-and-faster.html#more-173281 https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/09/version-2-starlink-wit...
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- qayxc 5y ago> 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 to deploy their infrastructure. As far as commercial crewed missions are concerned, there has been one so far with at least two further missions in the pipeline for the next 12 months. Even if I'm being generous and grant them two private crewed missions per year, that's not exactly a multi-billion dollar business. Considering that Boeing isn't just in the space launch business but also is the second part of the global commercial jet duopoly besides Airbus and is a major defence contractor as well, I'd think that the valuation contains a lot of... optimism? As it stands Starlink loses money with each customer for the ground equipment. Starship isn't flying yet and realistically speaking, the future of Starlink depends on that system to both work and be significantly cheaper than F9. There's a lot of if's riding on that valuation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_spaceflight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_spaceflight
- Barrin92 5y agois there a precise difference between spacex as a unicorn or just a very valuable private company? Because they are basically a private aerospace firm but I'm not sure whether they're doing anything that distinguishes them as a startup. They are older than say Facebook after all.
- missedthecue 5y agoAt this point, why not throw Koch industries in the list.
- ralfd 5y agoIs Koch Industries still a startup?
- missedthecue 5y agoIt is if they add "blockchain" to their name. They're already big into technology. (they own Molex and Infor)
- nhumrich 5y agoHow do you define "startup"?
- moralestapia 5y agoIs SpaceX still a startup?
- swyx 5y agothis is Saudi Aramco erasure and I won't stand for it
- nhumrich 5y ago"2nd Unicorn" How are we defining unicorn these days? Surely it's not just private vs public. There are other 100 billion private companies.