21 ms·

SpaceX Tender Offer Said to Value Company at Record $210B

41 points by jmsflknr 2y ago

ipnon 2y ago
Seems low to me. It seems quite plausible for SpaceX to be able to complete a space mining operation given their current operations and runway. If you can bring a trillion dollar rock back to Earth or at least LEO every few years, that's quite a valuable company.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  When Spain looted the New World of gold and transported it back to Spain, it did not make Spain wealthy. It simply resulted in a lot of inflation.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I'd like to think we've learned a thing or two since the 16th century.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Sadly, nope. Every nation on the planet still tries the same thing - printing money in the doomed hope it will make the nation wealthy.
      - akie 2y ago
        Countries sometimes print money to pay their debts because it’s easier than earning the money to pay their debts.
      - oezi 2y ago
        Most national central banks are well aware and aren't printing money at will. But certainly some monetary easing can generate quite some wealth.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        They are printing deficit money when they have inflation, because that's the fundamental cause of inflation.
      - imtringued 2y ago
        As opposed to a lack of money being a friction that prevents a country from being wealthy? It is very easy to point out how an economy with perfect information and perfect cooperation has zero demand for money, but reality works very differently.
  - kaptainscarlet 2y ago
    Yeah, a trillion dollars of gold from soace will definitely crash the gold market
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      I always laugh at the size of Smaug's gold hoard in the Hobbit movie. Unleashing even a fraction of it would make all the gold in Middle Earth worthless.
    - rasz 2y ago
      They could sell fuckton of gold options before announcing the mission.
  - nick7376182 2y ago
    However it did make some Spaniards wealthy
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Some Spaniards, yes. Not the country.
      - adriancr 2y ago
        Spain as a country was one of the most powerful and largest of that time period. So of course the whole country benefited. As for some spaniards profiting, of course, it was still feudal, aristocracy profited.
  - matthewbauer 2y ago
    It definitely made Spain extremely wealthy.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      The actual wealth in an economy is the value of goods and services. Money is not a good or a service. Increasing the amount of money does not change the value of goods and services, it just devalues the money (inflation).
  - aeternum 2y ago
    Gold and money does not make people rich. Companies like SpaceX that bring new technology to humanity do. Somehow Europe lost sight of that and the US seems to be on the same path.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    Spain now had way more wealth the its neighbors, relatively speaking, even if it didn't have more wealth than before. In a world of mercenary armies and continental trade, that matters a lot. Sure, maybe the mercenaries are now asking for double what they asked before, but they're asking your neighbors for double too, and your neighbors didn't also get a huge injection of gold. Also, gold wasn't used to build things, so it contributes very little to wealth (jewelery and decorations notwithstanding). Having a huge injection of iron or uranium or tritium or helium or lithium or other rare and sought-after elements today would be an entirely different story. Of course, the whole idea of bringing an asteroid to earth to mine is pure sci-fi at this moment, so this is all moot.
    - chii 2y ago
      Those resources already exist on earth, for which it'd be cheaper to just mine it out of the ground, than to spend the energy to bring ore back (then spend the same amount as earth mined ore to process!). The one thing those asteroids have going for it is that it's already in space - so if you were planning on building a space station, space ship or something of that nature, you might be better off mining in space to produce the materials for it (and save the launch costs, for the one time cost of launching space mining and manufacturing plants).
- yuppiepuppie 2y ago
  I don’t disagree. Someone above said bytedance is valued similarly which I find really surprising given the value-prop of the two companies couldn’t be further away from each other. One tries to suck time and energy away from humanity while the other tries to expand our human capacity beyond our planet. If I were a betting man, I’d wager SpaceX to be valued more in the long run.
- psunavy03 2y ago
  > If you can bring a trillion dollar rock back to Earth or at least LEO every few years, . . . you'd destabilize the world economy, and your trillion-dollar rock would either no longer be a trillion-dollar rock, or else your trillion dollars won't buy nearly as much as it would have before.
  - pokstad 2y ago
    That depends. Right now we have a scarcity mindset with regards to certain materials. A trillion dollar rock could open up new use cases we never imagined before because it was too cost prohibitive.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    if they have to settle for destabilizing the world economy and having only a $50 billion rock, I think SpaceX will be alright.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Maybe if they ever get anywhere close to asteroid mining their value will go up. They’re closer than anyone else, but they’re still very far away from that. When Starship is making regular flights, and making regular flights beyond Earth orbit, they’ll be in a position to start thinking about asteroid mining. Tho I think Moon operations will take up enough of their time, they may not spend much time looking at mining. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe they’ve talked much about mining on their roadmap.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  The naysayers for your comment seem to believe that you mean a trillion dollars worth of minerals will be delivered to Earth immediately when they get the asteroid into orbit.
- ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago
  What could you make with unlimited palladium?
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  How is there so much sci-fi wishful thinking so pervasive here? How do you even imagine that any technology could safely move an asteroid to LEO every few years (and probably have it crash into the Earth a few years after that)? Nevermind a technology that we would develop in the next 100-500 years? I would be willing to bet that SpaceX will be long gone as a company before the first successful (cash-flow positive) asteroid mining operations will begin long in our future. And that it will barely be a memory by the time we start bringing asteroids closer to the earth to mine them, if that ever happens. They will of course have made some serious contributions to this future, but this is waaaaay beyond anything we'll see in our lifetimes, and companies just don't tend to live that long.
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Ugh paywalled. Surprised yet at the same time I'm not. Its hard to really understand money at that scale.
metadat 2y ago
https://archive.today/VjzYe https://archive.today/VjzYe Warning: Disappointingly thin, only a single paragraph in total. I was surprised to learn Bytedance (TikTok) is only valued at $268B.
- justahuman74 2y ago
  Bytedance would be valued higher if they didn't have geopolitics weighing them down
  - nick7376182 2y ago
    If they offered 51% of the company on a US ipo would they still be looking at getting banned?
    - londons_explore 2y ago
      Let's be honest, the US ban is all political. If they find a way around it, the goalposts will be moved. Remember the last dispute was solved by paying Oracle a lot of money (a bribe) to onshore all of US citizens data... Yet a few years later and suddenly that isn't enough.
    - justahuman74 2y ago
      Depends on who ends up controlling the company, if the 51% isn't coordinated then the 49% could still call the shots
- napierzaza 2y ago
  [dead]
avmich 2y ago
SpaceX designed reusable rocket first stage to slash costs. Everybody said reusability only makes sense when there's lot of flights - because large development costs have to be distributed across many flights. So, roughly, to ensure Falcon-9 flies a lot, SpaceX invented Starlink which could use a lot of flights. Now they have a well-functioning rocket company - 2-3 second stages built per week, and ocassional first stage - and the Starlink, which is already in black. Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization? How much SpaceX as a company will cost then?
- jzawodn 2y ago
  They didn't invent Starlink. They bought the company.
  - sweettea 2y ago
    I don't think this is correct. As far as I understand it, Elon/SpaceX did attempt a previous investment in satellite internet, but it had died long before Starlink came to be in 2014.
    - andsoitis 2y ago
      Indeed. Starlink was publicly announced in January 2015 with the opening of the SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington Full surrounding history at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
- codeflo 2y ago
  > Starlink, which is already in black It doesn’t make sense to claim “Starlink is profitable” if the underlying rockets still lose money and you don’t account for that in the claim. > they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights Losing money with your expensive solution? Easy, just invent a profitable problem.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
It would be fascinating to see how the proceeds of such an offer were split. I've heard whispers that SpaceX has a bunch of debt that is collateralized by Tesla stock, if that's true there is clearly a case for margin pressure there. There is the open question of what SpaceX will do with "all that lift capacity, if you give all earth to orbit contracts to SpaceX it still takes a long time to pay back that investment. Starlink was a good fit for Falcon 9, and murmurs that it is cash flow positive not withstanding, having your finger on "world internet" is cool[1] until the world takes it away from you. On orbit refueling, which means having a fuel depot in orbit that has active cryo chillers operating to keep fuel for long periods of time, could be that answer since there is nominally "unlimited" demand for fuel in orbit, but the technology to make that work still has a lot of unknown unknowns. (I loved the ULA concept of using fuel boil off to run an internal combustion engine in the fuel depot that did active refrigeration, but that is still untested) Still, having the only functioning orbital gas station would have even more leverage than having the only world internet. As Exxon et al have shown, you can extract a lot of value from people who can't get their gas anywhere else. Let's say a Starship flight costs $150 million to put 10 tons of cryo-fuel into orbit, can you sell it at $20 M/ton to customers? It only costs $250 - $300 to "make" liquid methane, maybe $200/ton for oxygen. That's some healthy markup and that would definitely make money. [1] I am a Starlink customer and it has made working remotely from anywhere actually possible, that said if they decide to squeeze really hard that could cease to be the case.
- avmich 2y ago
  With working Starship, it's much easier to put industry on the Moon. The first product could be oxygen from the rocks, which could outcompete Earth-based oxygen for refueling on LEO. We actually seem to have more and more need in the space-based industry. Not only unique products requiring microgravity to get produced. For example, right now we need a lot of data centers - and those could be placed in space, reducing load on Earth environment and power. And all of that increase in activity is going to go through Starships initially. SpaceX is in a really unique position. In XIX century nobody thought they'll need to use railroads to travel far and often. But there were many railroad-building companies. Now we have problem figuring out why we need cheap massive access to space. Could it be that we won't find uses for it?
nick7376182 2y ago
Elon cashing out to pay interest on his margin loan. Could be he finally doesn't want to sell any more Tesla stock.
htrp 2y ago
Perun does a pretty good primer around space (and spaceX in general) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo

41 points by jmsflknr 2y ago

Seems low to me. It seems quite plausible for SpaceX to be able to complete a space mining operation given their current operations and runway. If you can bring a trillion dollar rock back to Earth or at least LEO every few years, that's quite a valuable company.

WalterBright 2y ago
When Spain looted the New World of gold and transported it back to Spain, it did not make Spain wealthy. It simply resulted in a lot of inflation.
- fragmede 2y ago
  I'd like to think we've learned a thing or two since the 16th century.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Sadly, nope. Every nation on the planet still tries the same thing - printing money in the doomed hope it will make the nation wealthy.
    - akie 2y ago
      Countries sometimes print money to pay their debts because it’s easier than earning the money to pay their debts.
    - oezi 2y ago
      Most national central banks are well aware and aren't printing money at will. But certainly some monetary easing can generate quite some wealth.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        They are printing deficit money when they have inflation, because that's the fundamental cause of inflation.
    - imtringued 2y ago
      As opposed to a lack of money being a friction that prevents a country from being wealthy? It is very easy to point out how an economy with perfect information and perfect cooperation has zero demand for money, but reality works very differently.
- kaptainscarlet 2y ago
  Yeah, a trillion dollars of gold from soace will definitely crash the gold market
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    I always laugh at the size of Smaug's gold hoard in the Hobbit movie. Unleashing even a fraction of it would make all the gold in Middle Earth worthless.
  - rasz 2y ago
    They could sell fuckton of gold options before announcing the mission.
- nick7376182 2y ago
  However it did make some Spaniards wealthy
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Some Spaniards, yes. Not the country.
    - adriancr 2y ago
      Spain as a country was one of the most powerful and largest of that time period. So of course the whole country benefited. As for some spaniards profiting, of course, it was still feudal, aristocracy profited.
- matthewbauer 2y ago
  It definitely made Spain extremely wealthy.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The actual wealth in an economy is the value of goods and services. Money is not a good or a service. Increasing the amount of money does not change the value of goods and services, it just devalues the money (inflation).
- aeternum 2y ago
  Gold and money does not make people rich. Companies like SpaceX that bring new technology to humanity do. Somehow Europe lost sight of that and the US seems to be on the same path.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  Spain now had way more wealth the its neighbors, relatively speaking, even if it didn't have more wealth than before. In a world of mercenary armies and continental trade, that matters a lot. Sure, maybe the mercenaries are now asking for double what they asked before, but they're asking your neighbors for double too, and your neighbors didn't also get a huge injection of gold. Also, gold wasn't used to build things, so it contributes very little to wealth (jewelery and decorations notwithstanding). Having a huge injection of iron or uranium or tritium or helium or lithium or other rare and sought-after elements today would be an entirely different story. Of course, the whole idea of bringing an asteroid to earth to mine is pure sci-fi at this moment, so this is all moot.
  - chii 2y ago
    Those resources already exist on earth, for which it'd be cheaper to just mine it out of the ground, than to spend the energy to bring ore back (then spend the same amount as earth mined ore to process!). The one thing those asteroids have going for it is that it's already in space - so if you were planning on building a space station, space ship or something of that nature, you might be better off mining in space to produce the materials for it (and save the launch costs, for the one time cost of launching space mining and manufacturing plants).
yuppiepuppie 2y ago
I don’t disagree. Someone above said bytedance is valued similarly which I find really surprising given the value-prop of the two companies couldn’t be further away from each other. One tries to suck time and energy away from humanity while the other tries to expand our human capacity beyond our planet. If I were a betting man, I’d wager SpaceX to be valued more in the long run.
psunavy03 2y ago
> If you can bring a trillion dollar rock back to Earth or at least LEO every few years, . . . you'd destabilize the world economy, and your trillion-dollar rock would either no longer be a trillion-dollar rock, or else your trillion dollars won't buy nearly as much as it would have before.
- pokstad 2y ago
  That depends. Right now we have a scarcity mindset with regards to certain materials. A trillion dollar rock could open up new use cases we never imagined before because it was too cost prohibitive.
- fragmede 2y ago
  if they have to settle for destabilizing the world economy and having only a $50 billion rock, I think SpaceX will be alright.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
Maybe if they ever get anywhere close to asteroid mining their value will go up. They’re closer than anyone else, but they’re still very far away from that. When Starship is making regular flights, and making regular flights beyond Earth orbit, they’ll be in a position to start thinking about asteroid mining. Tho I think Moon operations will take up enough of their time, they may not spend much time looking at mining. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe they’ve talked much about mining on their roadmap.
readthenotes1 2y ago
The naysayers for your comment seem to believe that you mean a trillion dollars worth of minerals will be delivered to Earth immediately when they get the asteroid into orbit.
ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago
What could you make with unlimited palladium?
tsimionescu 2y ago
How is there so much sci-fi wishful thinking so pervasive here? How do you even imagine that any technology could safely move an asteroid to LEO every few years (and probably have it crash into the Earth a few years after that)? Nevermind a technology that we would develop in the next 100-500 years? I would be willing to bet that SpaceX will be long gone as a company before the first successful (cash-flow positive) asteroid mining operations will begin long in our future. And that it will barely be a memory by the time we start bringing asteroids closer to the earth to mine them, if that ever happens. They will of course have made some serious contributions to this future, but this is waaaaay beyond anything we'll see in our lifetimes, and companies just don't tend to live that long.

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

Ugh paywalled. Surprised yet at the same time I'm not. Its hard to really understand money at that scale.

metadat 2y ago

https://archive.today/VjzYe https://archive.today/VjzYe Warning: Disappointingly thin, only a single paragraph in total. I was surprised to learn Bytedance (TikTok) is only valued at $268B.

justahuman74 2y ago
Bytedance would be valued higher if they didn't have geopolitics weighing them down
- nick7376182 2y ago
  If they offered 51% of the company on a US ipo would they still be looking at getting banned?
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    Let's be honest, the US ban is all political. If they find a way around it, the goalposts will be moved. Remember the last dispute was solved by paying Oracle a lot of money (a bribe) to onshore all of US citizens data... Yet a few years later and suddenly that isn't enough.
  - justahuman74 2y ago
    Depends on who ends up controlling the company, if the 51% isn't coordinated then the 49% could still call the shots
napierzaza 2y ago
[dead]

avmich 2y ago

SpaceX designed reusable rocket first stage to slash costs. Everybody said reusability only makes sense when there's lot of flights - because large development costs have to be distributed across many flights. So, roughly, to ensure Falcon-9 flies a lot, SpaceX invented Starlink which could use a lot of flights. Now they have a well-functioning rocket company - 2-3 second stages built per week, and ocassional first stage - and the Starlink, which is already in black. Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization? How much SpaceX as a company will cost then?

jzawodn 2y ago
They didn't invent Starlink. They bought the company.
- sweettea 2y ago
  I don't think this is correct. As far as I understand it, Elon/SpaceX did attempt a previous investment in satellite internet, but it had died long before Starlink came to be in 2014.
  - andsoitis 2y ago
    Indeed. Starlink was publicly announced in January 2015 with the opening of the SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington Full surrounding history at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
codeflo 2y ago
> Starlink, which is already in black It doesn’t make sense to claim “Starlink is profitable” if the underlying rockets still lose money and you don’t account for that in the claim. > they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights Losing money with your expensive solution? Easy, just invent a profitable problem.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

It would be fascinating to see how the proceeds of such an offer were split. I've heard whispers that SpaceX has a bunch of debt that is collateralized by Tesla stock, if that's true there is clearly a case for margin pressure there. There is the open question of what SpaceX will do with "all that lift capacity, if you give all earth to orbit contracts to SpaceX it still takes a long time to pay back that investment. Starlink was a good fit for Falcon 9, and murmurs that it is cash flow positive not withstanding, having your finger on "world internet" is cool[1] until the world takes it away from you. On orbit refueling, which means having a fuel depot in orbit that has active cryo chillers operating to keep fuel for long periods of time, could be that answer since there is nominally "unlimited" demand for fuel in orbit, but the technology to make that work still has a lot of unknown unknowns. (I loved the ULA concept of using fuel boil off to run an internal combustion engine in the fuel depot that did active refrigeration, but that is still untested) Still, having the only functioning orbital gas station would have even more leverage than having the only world internet. As Exxon et al have shown, you can extract a lot of value from people who can't get their gas anywhere else. Let's say a Starship flight costs $150 million to put 10 tons of cryo-fuel into orbit, can you sell it at $20 M/ton to customers? It only costs $250 - $300 to "make" liquid methane, maybe $200/ton for oxygen. That's some healthy markup and that would definitely make money. [1] I am a Starlink customer and it has made working remotely from anywhere actually possible, that said if they decide to squeeze really hard that could cease to be the case.

avmich 2y ago
With working Starship, it's much easier to put industry on the Moon. The first product could be oxygen from the rocks, which could outcompete Earth-based oxygen for refueling on LEO. We actually seem to have more and more need in the space-based industry. Not only unique products requiring microgravity to get produced. For example, right now we need a lot of data centers - and those could be placed in space, reducing load on Earth environment and power. And all of that increase in activity is going to go through Starships initially. SpaceX is in a really unique position. In XIX century nobody thought they'll need to use railroads to travel far and often. But there were many railroad-building companies. Now we have problem figuring out why we need cheap massive access to space. Could it be that we won't find uses for it?

nick7376182 2y ago

Elon cashing out to pay interest on his margin loan. Could be he finally doesn't want to sell any more Tesla stock.

htrp 2y ago

Perun does a pretty good primer around space (and spaceX in general) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo