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

Watch when their resuable rocket thing pans out

[Qbertino]

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.

Re:Watch when their resuable rocket thing pans out

[Kjella]

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.

Orders of magnitude? No. Musk said fuel is currently about 3% of total launch cost. One order of magnitude would make that 30%, two orders would be 300%. Unless you can work magic in fuel efficiency and do the rest for free, not happening. Even with Musk's most generous long time full reuse scenario (where a booster has 1000 launches, tanker 100 and the spaceship 12 and the refurb costs are minimal like <0.1% on the booster and <1% on the tanker) he's estimating $140/kg to Mars surface. Until you got a working fuel production plant on Mars so the spaceship can return - a highly theoretical idea at the moment - then $520/kg. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include development costs, this is purely marginal costs but let's ignore those.

So for a person ~$50k minimum ticket price, of course that doesn't include air, water, food, heating, shielding or anything else you'd need on a months-long trip through space. Or anything you'd need to survive on Mars a couple years, if not you personally then all the people working there maintaining the base and supporting you. I'm thinking $200k at least. So after being stuck in a tin can for months you're stuck in a slightly bigger dome for 2.5 years and even though you can go outside it's not exactly like home. Then some more months in a tin can before you land back on earth and discover your muscles haven't tried 1G for almost three years. And unlike a submarine that can actually abort and surface if they have to, that's not an option here.

I think the novelty of it will wear off real quick and after three years you'll feel more like a supermax prisoner that's finally out of jail than anyone who has had the experience of a lifetime. That is unless there's any system failure of any kind along the way where you'll most likely end up dead. Don't get me wrong, the first to go will be super-celebrities and all that so that will be cool. But when you're like the 834th person on Mars, eh... and it's not like you're climbing Mount Everest or something, you're probably doing routine maintenance most the time. I should probably also remind you that nobody has come up with any commercially viable business on Mars - at best it's reducing the costs so Earth won't have to pay as much to support a Mars outpost. It still takes political will to fund it, cost-plus or fixed price.

Or maybe I should put this in a TL;DR form: Even if Musk achieves everything he wants to do, most space sci-fi will remain fiction.

These low interests rates and cheap money.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yes big investors can be irresponsible

[sjbe]

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.