SpaceX raises another $100M
sec.gov
sec.gov
Big wikipedia list of private space companies (no funding info): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co...
Overall venture funding going up (from 2015): http://fortune.com/2016/02/22/vcs-invested-more-in-space-sta...
A conservative estimate of annual payroll on /r/spacex from this week was $700mm.[1] Each Falcon 9 costs about $62mm, though some of the oldest contracts are for far less and government missions are more (plus Dragon). Cash-flow-wise, payments are broken up over the separate phases of the contract. They have launched 16 rockets this year, 8 last year and 6 the two years before. (Not counting one failure in each 2015 and 2016 — though we know SpaceX earned at least part of its CRS-7 milestone payments by getting off the pad.)
[0] https://equidateinc.com/company/space-exploration-technologi...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7fk828/estimation_o...
Sure reality is more nuanced than that, but it's a fun comparison to make.
Just shows where humanity’s overall priorities are, funny enough.
Just for comparison, $19 billion is what the first operational fusion power reactor is budgeted to cost. Instead of Whatsapp, the world could have fusion power. Tell me that makes sense.
I'm sure if HN could combine savings from annual budget the $5 lattes and $2,000+ annual refreshes of the Shinybook Pro, we'd be halfway there. But hey, maybe the value provided in an affordable SMS replacement to a billion people isn't all that, right? It's just a replaceable app, why don't they get iPhones and use iMessage. /s
HN can be hilariously condescending - "I don't use this, it doesn't impact me, I don't understand it - therefore it can't be worth much".
> Tell me that makes sense.
WhatsApp provides massive value to its users, especially when they supported feature phones. What's the human value of a poor rural farmer sending a message to their child in the next city over "Your mom isn't feeling well, please send money for a clinic visit"? I bet it is more than the $1/year WhatsApp originally charged. Communication is a force-multiplier - someone smarter than me has probably already calculated the value WhatsApp has added to the world by merely existing.
I'm not a Facebook fan- I hate that Facebook changed the monetization model and are dropping WhatsApp support for feature phones in pursuit of features. However, Facebook paid $19 billion because WhatsApp was potentially an existential threat to Fb. Why don't you and a small team develop a fusion reactor and see how much GE/Saudi Aramco will pay - I bet it would be north of $19 billion.
First it starts by claiming that I don't understand, use, or appreciate messaging in general. This is of course without any background or support, and is simply an ad hominem. I have a more extensive background in messaging than most people in tech. There is no condescension in making a value judgement of yet another messaging application vs a fundamental energy source technology.
Next you make some statements in support of value for WA. Regardless of the value of messaging in general, WA is is simply yet another app in a very crowded market. Its purchase was clearly anti-competitive, rather than innovative, and as such can not be justified based on function.
Last you hurl some weird non-sequitur that implies my judgement is incorrect because I'm not a fusion researcher/implementor working on disrupting the world energy market, combined with some kind of conspiracy theory about Saudi Aramco? That's just plain specious. One can clearly judge the value of working fusion energy without being a physicist.
So please, re-read the posting guidelines and reconsider how you address others and their arguments. Thank you.
This is the root of our disconnect - I strongly disagree with your assertion that WhatsApp was merely "yet another messaging application". If it were, why aren't Slack and the rest of them being snapped up for $19 billion?
You have an extensive background in messaging tech - I have a more extensive background than most in the 3rd world. I witnessed the phenomenon that was WhatsApp firsthand. What other messenger supported feature phones (think Nokia S40 and S60)? This probably doesn't matter in your world, and probably gives you a blindspot that causes you to not see the value that is readily apparent to me.
Our disconnect may boil down to this: in my view, WhatsApp's features are, in hindsight, obvious, simple, and easy to implement by any competitor. The advantage (and value) in WA is in the already grown network, the familiar marketplace network effect growing out of that.
Facebook acquired WA for the network of users, not the messaging features. It could easily and more cheaply have fielded an identical app with the same or superior features. It didn't, though, because it wanted to not leave a competitor in the marketplace.
Thus the judgement that it was $19B of mis-allocated capital from a larger viewpoint. We apparently disagree on this point.
On the other hand, working fusion power technology would be hugely consequential for most of the human race, especially in places like Africa that are so energy-needy at this point in their development.
> Thus the judgement that it was $19B of mis-allocated capital from a larger viewpoint. We apparently disagree on this point.
I almost agree, only I believe there's more nuance to this. Fb was never going to invest $19B in fusion power, so to say it was mis-allocated feels wrong. The only reason it spent so much was that WhatsApp was a potential existential threat to Fb. This was the point I was attempting to put across, abeit poorly - that a scrappy company that manages to achieve fusion would be an existential threat to energy companies and would be worth billions for that reason alone.
Has Pinterest even reached product/market fit?
You could even set a custom search engine keyword that searches Google Images with the above included automatically.
By staying private, Elon can choose whom to allows to invest in so that the missions stays what he wants it to be. It’d rather not make money from SpaceX then have them going on the wrong path and become yet another government competing space company that does little innovation and just sucks up government money.
The character of future society on Mars will in large part depend on the policies of the large corporations that provide the technology and infrastructure to make it possible, and I would rather that Mars society looks like a diverse, free, liberal democracy with reasonable opportunities for homesteading and an efficient economy with multiple competing vendors for various resources and not like a forced labor camp where you work your 80 hours a week in exchange for the CO2 filters you need to survive, or like a tourist destination where one company owns the whole Mars Experience.
In the short term it's probably inevitable that one company will have a transportation-to-Mars monopoly, but if that company has some good founding principles and a vision that doesn't involve milking every last dime out of their monopoly status, then I can at least feel a little better that Mars has a chance of not becoming a dystopia.
Lots of people complain about how unfair it is that the US has billionaires, but without billionaires would we have SpaceX? I doubt it.
A thousand million-dollar startups can probably do more innovation between them than one billion-dollar startup. Maybe we would've ended up with a different structure - maybe one company would make a better engine and sell it to Boeing or whoever, and another would make better structural components, and another would come up with the landing systems by licensing control systems from yet another... but I think without billionaires (and remember Musk is one billionaire of many, he's by no means the median example) we'd get more value for society overall.
"I wish we could be private with Tesla. It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company." - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/elon-musk-inve...
The stock market news cycle is a constant barrage of criticism every quarter: commentary on whether they made some random analyst's projections, investors asking the same inane questions over and over... How many times has he given the "there's no point in giving you delivery estimates for specific months because the ramp will be exponential and small factors can change individual months by an order of magnitude" speech? I've heard him say that at least 10 times, and yet investors keep asking the same dumb questions every earnings call.
Which isn't really that huge of a time sink, but then people go and make a big deal out of that stuff in the press, "Model 3 production was supposed to be 5,000 by year end, and it's looking more like 500... Tesla suffers 90% crash in production rate! It's all over folks!" Even though Musk described this scenario two years ago, and said it was accounted for in their planning.
Now imagine he's trying to get to Mars and every 3 months he has to go in front of investors who are asking, "So, your orbital launch rate for this quarter seems to be 50% lower than projections, would you say that's more due to your incompetence or is it more that your business model is fundamentally flawed?"
He's not optimizing for quarterly revenue. He's not optimizing for revenue at all, he's optimizing to make something fundamentally new and valuable happen, and he's calculating that the value will come, although it's never clear what year. But a segment of public investors seem unable to accept that story.
Incompetence is blind trust. A good investor actually cares about the performance of the companies in which they invest - and that includes its ability to realistically project and meet those projections. A CEO who promises the moon on a stick and delivers little is not doing his job well. I am a fan of Elon, but you can't take a whole heap of money and then complain that people are interested.
As people have said, you can avoid this obligation to your shareholders by not having any.
But Elon is not promising the moon. He is very clear when he states his goals, that these goals are very ambitious goals and that the probability of meeting them is fairly low.
there is a lot of additional reporting for publicly traded companies and that is a good thing.
And that right there is the reason that SpaceX will not be public. SpaceX is an investment in humanity, not a financial investment.
http://blog.sfgate.com/pender/2015/03/25/see-which-fidelity-...
If SpaceX is valued at about $20 billion, Google owns 9%, and Google's market cap is $720 billion, buying Google gets you 0.25% of that investment into SpaceX. Almost nothing, but better than Fidelity's exposure.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_D_(SEC)#Rule_506
I have seen this done when someone comes along who would really like to invest in your privately held company but the company doesn't want to go through the whole process of evaluation and term negotiations of a new funding round. If your current investors are ok with it, you re-open the previous round (same price per share so only your post money valuation changes) same terms and same rights. If everyone signs off then you collect the money, issue the additional shares and carry on.
At the time (July of this year) they were valued at $21B so $100M is about .5% of the company. I'd probably take that deal if I had $100M to spare and Elon would let me put it into SpaceX :-)
Also, does this mean that SpaceX could raise funds indefinitely without going public as long as they come from the same source?
Edit: Turns out that was a bit of a silly question. Thanks for the replies.
- SpaceX charges $60M per launch.
- Elon said fuel is $200k-$300k when explaining the value of reusability.
- majority of cost is probably engine, followed by fairing, which Elon has said is expensive enough to want to reuse.
Keep in mind that there're a lot of operational and R&D expenses, and the launches have to cover that too, so I assume a healthy margin on each launch.
A F9 rocket is 14 tons of mostly aluminium alloys. The materials aren't a big fraction of the costs.
Manufacturing is very expensive, but due to the accuracy, repeatability and size of parts needed, the vast majority of the work is semi-automated. It's the tooling and design thats expensive, not each individual rocket.
Their BFR system is aiming to launch more weight at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars per launch. But they need to find customers to recoup several billion in development costs on it.
They only stated publicly that will cost "less than Falcon 1" per launch. That means less than ~$6 million. The few hundred thousand dollars figure is the cost of the fuel, which will become the main cost after full reusability is achieved.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-27/elon-musk...
>Space Exploration Technologies Corp. added another $100 million to its latest fundraising round, bringing the total to nearly $450 million, according to an amended regulatory filing.
>The closely held company founded by Elon Musk had disclosed in August raising about $350 million the previous month. The round values the company at more than $21 billion, according to Equidate.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000118141217...
So maybe this is about shares conversion?
- fmr investment banker
- Source: venture lawyer, but not your lawyer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15782634
I'd call it "Moonbucks".
But what it takes is money, lots and lots of money. Bezos has that....
As a case in point, Blue Origin started before SpaceX. They have put more money into development than SpaceX. But they have yet to launch a single rocket into orbit.
And yet, Blue Origin is not bad. They appear to be in the same ballpark of costs as NASA originally estimated for development on the Falcon 1. They are just failing to rewrite the rules the way that SpaceX has consistently done.
That said, if SpaceX ever fails as a business because Elon takes one risk too many, I'm sure that Blue Origin will happily buy the technology...
And while the Merlin series has been conservative in most aspects, Merlin 1D has a few unique characteristics, like the pintle injector (previously used in the Apollo LM), phased-shutoff (or whatever the spelling is, from Tom Mueller's interview from half a year ago), use of subchilled propellants and a very tightly manufacture process that makes it very cheap to produce.
On top of that it's now the engine with highest thrust-to-weight ratio in history that has flown, despite being open cycle (gas generator). And not a single M1D failed so far.
Generally I dont feel money always wins these things. It can certainly help but its only one of many variables to success.
I read SpaceX, exactly as written in the title. My brain convolved it with Tesla, and I started reading the comments thinking 'This won't do much to increase Tesla's runway'.
Need... deprogramming... now...