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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.
naah. that one gave a good solid boost to the summary and landed right on the mark.
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
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.
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.
He's not very good at punning. He tried making ten different puns yesterday, hoping at least one of them would elicit a laugh, but no pun in ten did.
So, apart from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
He may have lifted too much from the articles, but it did set the stage for his delivery.
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.