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Comment by strictnein | Hacker News Reader

I mean, SpaceX is great and all, but it's no Cargill or even in the same league as Cargill or other similar companies like Koch (which is #2 in the US):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill

   Revenue: US$109.6 billion (2017)[1]
   Net income: US$2.835 billion (2017)[1]
   Total assets: US$55.8 billion
   25% of all United States grain exports 
   22% of the US domestic meat market

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Yeah I found the valuation mildly depressing for similar contexts.. considering the total value of spaceX is less than half of the proposed ~increase~ to annual US military expenditure this year.

We could afford 2 fully-blown spaceX per year just by maintaining our present disproportionately large military rather than expanding it by roughly a Great Britain this year.

This can't be stressed enough. The military does a lot of R&D spending, but it's nowhere near as beneficial to the U.S. or the world than if we encouraged more space programs with that money.

It's unbelievably depressing to me that we could be leading civilization into a multi planetary age but choose not to.

The [space program] does a lot of R&D spending, but it's nowhere near as beneficial to the U.S. or the world than if we encouraged reduction in taxes so [private consumers and businesses] can instead spend that money.

History has demonstrated again and again that tax breaks are not an effective economic stimulus.

Each and every valuation attempt of a private tech company by the mainstream press takes the number of shares outstanding and multiplies it by the share price at the last round, pretending that preferred shares are valued as common. Since the round details are usually sealed (e.g., a company could in theory offer preferred shares with 100x liquidation pref and 25% annual preferred dividend, which would completely wipe out every shareholder except for the investors in the last round), the press doesn't really have a good way to value debt+equity instruments.

Wait a decade and spaceX will have the following line item:

100% of all interplanetary travel, shipping and trade.

lol want to make a bet on that?

I was being a little hyperbolic, but I'm curious, do you think Musk won't make it to Mars within 10 years or that other companies will be able to do it by then too?

Also counting up the company value based on investor deals is weird in itself. Just because I buy 1% of a startup for $10k, doesn't mean I would buy 100% for $1m.

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