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.

Comments

Valuations of private companies are challenging

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Watch when their resuable rocket thing pans out

[Rei]

The real value is what they plan to start launching once they get their cadence up. They're looking to launch a constellation of around 4000 LEO satellites to provide cheap, global, low-latency, high-bandwidth internet. I've seen some analyses of their plan, and done some of my own, and their numbers on all aspects are in general "tough, but it should be doable". The goal is to take over 50% of the backhaul traffic on the internet, while rapidly growing it by providing high speed access to previously isolated parts of the globe. The amount of money being talked about if they succeed is mind-boggling.

They're not the only one with this goal. Samsung announced a similar proposal, and Blue Origin is also striving for it. Everybody sees the dollar signs; the question is who will actually achieve it first?