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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.
Why, are a few billion people lining up to send stuff into orbit? A billion people probably do order stuff between amazon.com, alibaba, and Walmart everyday.
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"I send a post-carriage from Berlin to Potsdam every day and they're not even booked out. I don't understand why people would want to invest into this crazy harebrained extremely expensive train thing." (paraphrased) - German Reichspostminister roughly 2 centuries ago on this new "steam engine train fad" that was popping up everywhere.
In case you've missed it: It's SPACE. As in FREAKIN' HUGE. With tons of planets, astroids, dward-plantes and stuff ready to be colonized in our solar system alone. Yeah, sure, technology isn't there yet, but dividing cost-to-orbit by 15 is a huge leap on the way and will change perspective and usage of space travel notably vis-a-vis what is possible today.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.