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SpaceX Is Now One of the World's Most Valuable Privately Held Companies (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America. This skyrocket in valuation comes after another round of funding that raised $351 million for the company. According to Equidate, a marketplace for trading private tech company stocks, SpaceX's price per share is now $135, up from $96.42 prior to the new funding round. The latest valuation makes SpaceX one of the top five most valuable private, venture-backed tech companies in the US, joining Uber ($69.8B), Airbnb ($31B), WeWork ($20.8B), and the less consumer-facing analytics company Palantir ($21.3B). (SpaceX previously held the sixth spot before Snap, Inc. went public in March.) All five companies are disruptive forces in their respective industries, and also top the world's most valuable startups alongside Didi Chuxing and Xiaomi, as first pointed out by The New York Times. Last year, SpaceX was valued at $14.6 billion.
"This skyrocket in valuation..."
Nothing against bad puns, but you overdid it here.
Not an exclusive club, really.
Watch what happens when their reusable rocket thing actually finally pans out. They're still somewhat in the experimentation/development phase of that. But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Considering how things are going and how Elon Musk and the people he get's on board have a reputation for getting the job done this evaluation is entirely justified IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
it's not out there.. cease fire stand down,, good sports with good spirits in every town.. tears in the sky until the moms can stop crying all the time.. sing along.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ1ogv41A3E ..thanks again
These obscene valuations couldn't normally have happened in the past, but with today's low interest rates and cheap money we get these prices.
And do investors really understand ROI? SpaceX would have to become incredibly/'impossibly profitable to justify these valuations to get a decent return even at these current interest rates. Even the launch business increases increases tremendously, I still don't see how investors will get an adequate return. I have been wrong - once.
This cult of personality around Musk is getting very weird.
Mostly because of his publicists. That's why he has his publicists constantly putting some sort of story in the news and things he says: to keep his name on people's tongues. And when it comes time to get money, out comes the checkbooks. That's human nature. We're monkeys and the alpha monkey gets the spoils.
Tired and sad.
Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America.
That is a nearly meaningless sentence. There is no good way to meaningfully value private companies unless they sell a piece of themselves and even then you really are only getting one party's opinion of what they are worth unlike in a proper secondary market. So hypothetically if I were to buy 5% of SpaceX for $1 billion, I am implicitly saying that I value SpaceX at $20 billion. That is basically what happened here. But that doesn't really mean it is actually worth that in the wider market because of the problem of the winner's curse. Someone ponied up a lot of money in a funding round but one has to be careful to not extrapolate that one opinion too far.
Hey Donnie. You should have saved the Trannies in the military stuff for today. You need a new shiny to go 'look over there' with.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The only reason space space ex is so cheap is because they cut corners with safety. Their flying death trap will get a lot of people killed.
Presumably the people responsible for the $351 million in funding got a good look at the value before committing the money.
Possibly but sometimes they often don't get as good a look as you might imagine. That's not a huge investment by private equity standards and it's not hard to find cases where investors did not do their due diligence. The dotcom boom around 2000 was a great example of that. I have a lot of friends who are in the private equity world and while they are smart people they are hardly dispassionate and consistently rational. They make investing mistakes same as anyone else.
Not necessarily, but on the whole, I would expect a few private investors with a lot of money to do better than the general public on the open stock market.
Why would you assume that? They're not smarter than the general public and they don't have some special crystal ball that lets them make better than average decisions. Sometimes they have some inside information but they aren't special. In actuality private equity investors invest on a portfolio basis no different from you or me. As a rule of thumb they expect about 1 out of 10 investments it actually pay off significantly. Most of their investments are breakeven at best. They have no way of knowing if SpaceX is that special 1 of 10 that will be a home run.
Fundamentally, and absent interference like government regulations and such, what something is worth is always going to boil down to how much people are willing to pay for it and what the supplier is willing to sell it for. This has been understood for centuries.
The value of something in an open market is not the same thing as the value to one crazy investor. Just because someone is willing to pay an unreasonable price for something does not mean that is the market value of that item to any other buyer. So saying SpaceX is the "4th most valuable private company" doesn't really mean much because there is no objective way to corroborate that the price paid was rational.
$21.2B actually seems insulting for something that is infinitely more useful, and long lasting, say, Twitter or Facebook which have also have valuations in the billion range.
Thank you for making my point. Neither you nor I have any realistic way of evaluating if this one valuation of SpaceX is reasonable. Ask 20 analysts to come up with a valuation and you'll get 20 different prices. Which one is right? Is the price paid too high or too low or about right? People overpay for investments all the time. You only know if the price paid was a reasonable one later on. You are actually arguing that SpaceX should be worth more which might be true but you are just guessing. You need a market or at least an auction with numerous informed buyers to establish a market price.
If he is using oxygen and hydrogen to fuel the rockets, aren't we loosing it to outer space? If true, talk about your climate change!! Eesh!
If you want 'affordable' access to the Solar system, it looks like you're going to be going through SpaceX to get it.
That's not really worth much right now, because they haven't actually delivered it yet. You might think the expense of a rocket isn't a big deal because satellites and other things we want to get into space are expensive enough to justify the rocket's cost... but have you considered that the reason we're shipping expensive things out of our gravity well is because the rockets' costs mean less expensive items can't be justified?
If space access is inexpensive enough, we'll find more to do. Asteroid retrieval will get a massive kick in the ass (which will have massively disruptive effects on Earth but be really good for us in the long run). Space stations will be less expensive, enabling more research into keeping humans healthy off Earth. Lunar and Mars missions will be less expensive, giving us more capability to prep for humans to permanently occupy those bodies and see if we can make self-sufficient operations there.
There's a lot of really, really hard work to do to get there, but most of it is pointless if we can't even affordably reach Earth orbit. SpaceX is our current hope for getting us to the point that all that other work becomes meaningful.
Actually, if you're investing $350mm, you generally DO get a good way of knowing about the company you're investing in. That is - they pretty much tell you whatever you ask. You get to look at their plans, their tech, their infra, their people, etc.
I've been involved in several private equity investment deals first hand and that is demonstrably not true in many cases. I've been on both the buyer's side of the table and the seller. It depends on how the power relationships between the investor and the company sits. Sometimes the company doesn't give them nearly as much information as you would think would be appropriate. Sometimes the investor simply doesn't ask the right questions. Sometimes the investor doesn't ask enough questions. Sometimes fraud is involved. See Theranos if you need an example of most of the above. While most big dollar investors tend to do significant amounts of research they do not always do enough nor do they always do it well. This is no big secret.
If you really thing investors throw around that much money on a hunch without some realistic expectations you're naive.
I'm afraid you are the naive one here. I not only think that investors often throw around that kind of cash without appropriate due diligence, I know it for a fact and have seen innumerable cases of it. Private equity funds get money from investors and then they have to go out and find investments for that money with no guarantee that such investments are available for reasonable prices. A lot of the froth in the dotcom era was too many dollars chasing too few good opportunities. Companies got funded that had no business being funded and prices for good companies got bid up so high that a positive return on the investment was very difficult. At any given time there are a finite number of reasonably priced investments to be made and much like any other market sometimes the bidding become irrationally exuberant. Just because people have a lot of money to invest doesn't mean they are necessarily competent at doing so.
Look at it this way. 80-90% of mutual funds under perform the market average in any given year and almost none can do it for multiple years in a row. These are managed by experienced investment professionals with access to all the available information about the companies they invest in. And yet you think these people have some special advantage or insight? Big investors make stupid investments all the time. They just have to hope that some of their investments work out well enough to make up for the bad ones.
Also, if most of your investments break even and 1 in 10 is a huge hit then you are WAY ahead of the game.
I said "break even AT BEST". The at best bit is important. Many of them will lose money, sometimes a lot. Typically private equity funds will see 6-8 of their investments underwater to breakeven. 1-2 will be mild successes and if things go well, 1-2 at best will be big successes.
Any idiot with money to burn can throw billions at something.
Problem is that they aren't really profitable:
https://www.fool.com/investing...
And they now owe investors a ton of money/results. Though that may have worked for places like Amazon (whose initial investors were incredibly irate about such things), and though it might even make Musk richer (same as Jeff Bezos), it doesn't mean that it will translate into anything people can continue to use in the future when that investment doesn't pay off or provides only tiny margins at HUGE risk.
This is one of those times where you profit by knowing when to leave someone holding the hot potato.
SpaceX++
NASA--
who's the loser? Obviously NASA because SpaceX is the new rival company, private and not public.
SpaceX is getting money that was dedicated for NASA: the giant cheese is halved.
I really hope people walk away from these inflated valuations and start investing in companies with real products.
A few pestilent white monkeys invaded an continent and now they've multiplied by rabbits. Anyway, you racist piece of shit, eliminating a few white monkeys like you would be enough to save the earth for everyone else.
Very good point. One benefit of pubically traded companies is larger transaction volumes leading to more accurate pricing ( although here effects still apply).
A related area is house prices in UK. Trading volumes are historically low so assumptions on price being made on small number of transactions.
The value is what someone will pay to buy it.
So what if they will revolutionize space travel, Uber has an app. An APP!
What we think of the company. Musk.s companies are well loved by the people, Could you ever imagine a series of successful startups with the ultimate goal of literally saving humanity... there has never been one before.
[($)]
Unlike the established entities, they have less accountability and more opacity in terms of space travel - while stepping back to the Apollo era for their spacecraft.
When they finally catch up and make a proper Shuttle, they might have something.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Investors will get a view of a companies financial status past and projections. Stretch example - Some folks buy lottery tickets. Bond holders tend to be more empirical on the risk returns but debt will fluctuate along with value as conditions change. So optimistic folks are valuing Space X high now. Dominos Pizza when founded value has increased substantially, Iridium well not so fortunate but only time will tell. Think taking a chance on space flight among the more constructive gambles vs say SnapChat.