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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately[0], SpaceX as a company seems to be in good hands with Gwynne Shotwell. They're launching very regularly[1], haven't had a customer-impacting failure in years[2] and they've got the market cornered. They have customers lined up for years, and continually make huge gains by reducing costs. They've got a head start by at least 5-10 years over all new entrants (Blue Origin, Electron, etc) and are massively undercutting the legacy competitors (ULA).

If I could invest in SpaceX, I would.

[0] I think he's overworked and burned-out himself out but can't recognize it. Who am I to judge- I've been there.

[1] They were going to launch about 20 minutes ago actually, but scrubbed at the last minute. They'll probably launch it tomorrow.

[2] Two failures recently were Falcon Heavy middle core doing a dive instead of a landing due to running out of igniter fluid, and the much-watched booster 'water landing' recently, where they fully recovered the booster afterwards. Both were successful launches.

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While Musk has personally been a bit odd lately

I think Musk has shown something a little higher than eccentricity for as long as he's been in the public eye. I wouldn't want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.

> I wouldn't want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.

Which is perfectly fine as long as he keeps inspiring employees (and the world at large) so that they are even ready to "follow him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil..." (https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-with-for-Elon-...)

https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-spacex-tesla-employees-b...

> I wouldn't want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.

There are people great for depending on, and there are people great for following. Even if from far away. They are still great. Just in a different way.

That's an interesting perspective, one I had never thought about yet rings absolutely true.

For better or for worse, a lot of those less-good parts of his public life are public, and made public by him.

That's not accidental.

I think the flaws actually help him. It protects the ego of his followers. (Musk is more succesful, hard working, .... but he is an asshole) Many people are already irratioanlly triggered by him because their ego compares themselve to Musk. Would be way worse if he would act normal in Puplic ... and less PR of course

Agreed. Also, it reminded me of that quote by Colin Powell - "you'll know you're a good leader when people follow you if only out of curiosity"

If we take a step back to look at what Musk has done at scale:

* Tesla has tremendously accelerated electric car deployments. I am going to count Solar City in this bucket as well. It was not a smashing success as Tesla or SpaceX are, but it helped to accelerate solar deployments.

* SpaceX proven out booster re-usability and lowered launch prices.

* Helped start open AI which is pushing limits of building machine intelligence by tackling progressively harder problems.

Whatever you think about the man, you can't ever take away those accomplishments. All of the current controversy looks so small and insignificant compared to them.

Accusing one of the divers that rescued the kids from the Thai cave of being a pedophile was where my admiration flipped to a much more measured regard.

One can be a great person without being a good person. Something I feel people forget all to often.

We like to idealize those that accomplish much, but we also like to ignore that those accomplishments come with sacrifices that many aren't willing to make and a focus and drive that inverts many peoples optimal live balance on its head.

Never meet your heroes.

I suspect that many of the accomplished people are less than sane and pursue things for neurotic reasons but get results. It is a known thing that many political figures lost their father young.

Of course it is possible to be balanced and successful but the obsession leads to over-representation and the examples are outliers by definition essentially - otherwise it wouldn't be worth noting.

I've never heard that politicians thing - do you have any references on that?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/slate.com/news-and-politics/201...

It might be a bit spurious but that is a fairly strong trend.

Agreed. I am often surprised that not more people have learned this. As far back as high school (over 20 years ago), I learned that guys good in football that brought glory to our school were not necessarily the best people to hang out with. Some were idiots, to be frank, but on the field, they were a marvel to watch on the field. Since then I have always separated the man from his heroics.

I agree with this. There are countless examples of this in real life: Lewis Carroll (accusations of pedophilia), Roman Polanski (great filmmaker but charged with statutory rape), Woody Allen (another great filmmaker but cheated on his wife with their adopted daughter who he ended up marrying), Winston Churchill (helped defeat Fascism but many think he caused the Bengal famine that caused death of many Indians).

People have trouble with having two opinions of someone: one in terms of their professional achievements and another of their morality. I think it's a bit similar to doublethink.

Churchill was also largely responsible for the Gallipoli campaign. It’s actually remarkable that anyone could have a political career after a disaster of that scale.

While this doesn't take away from your point, I'd just like to mention that Vernon Unsworth isn't actually one of the two British divers who saved the kids (contrary to what the media seems to be implying). He is just one of the many divers who tried to save them.

Also, the diver was unnecessarily aggressive and condescending toward Elon Musk (who was just trying to build a submarine to save the kids), which is what actually prompted Elon to insult him.

Yeah, because as we all know, most people never have foot in mouths moments or say something dumb.

I don't think Musk is a bad person, I just think he doesn't have a great filter. Musk said something crappy and is getting disproportional blowback from it.

It's a bit like saying "I have nothing to hide because I've never said done anything illegal". If you dig far enough, everyone has done something "illegal" (read: mean / un-PC / etc)

There is nothing disproportionate about the blowback he got. It was not 'something crappy', it was a baseless and extremely disgusting accusation.

Normal people don't accuse someone who risked their life of being a paedo simply because they disagreed with him.

I'm not going to defend what he said, but if you look at the interaction it clearly took two to get into a juvenile Twitter fight, the other guy was no paragon of class himself. That aside, while it wasn't OK for Musk to say that, the blowback was IMO indeed disproportionate. How many other millions of horrible but effectively inconsequential statements on Twitter are routinely ignored? The guy's livelihood wasn't ruined and Musk was roundly rebuked.

How many CEOs have made a public comment like that? Pretty much every other CEO of multi-billion corporations has the self control to stay out of petty Twitter fights. And you're right that it takes 2 to pick a fight, and in this case someone who was involved in the cave rescue and instrumental to its success was calling out someone who tried to swoop in and take credit as a PR stunt. Musk couldn't handle getting called out on his actions and threw a temper tantrum. To me the blowback was entirely justified and I think he's going to pay out a fat settlement for it.

When did the guy risk his life? he was just a consultant for the rescue effort.

I wanted to call you wrong, but it appears that I had confused him with someone else - I had thought that Vern Unsworth, who had this "issue" with Elon Musk, was one of the initial divers laying out the guidelines through the cave as he was quoted as "helping the Thai SEALs with mapping out the cave), however, the actual life-risking guideline setup was done not by him but by other British divers - Richard Stanton and John Volanthen.

What would your reaction be if you spent time, work and money trying to help wiht a rescue, it doesn‘t work out and then this guy tells you to shove your rescue sub up your ass (that‘s what he literally said!)?

The sun was a stupid idea that would have never worked. A simple fuck off would have so much better than calling him apedo.

One life lesson that I wish I'd learned earlier: people who didn't ask for your help don't owe you anything. It is often presumptuous and unhelpful to assume that you know what is best.

My reaction would be to show some respect and humility when actual cave diving experts told me that I was on the wrong track.

Again, Musk's reaction to being told to shove the sub up his ass by this guy was over-the-top. I am _obviously_ not defending unfounded accusations of paedophilia.

But one of the two lead British divers did tell SpaceX in an e-mail to keep working on the sub, in case other plans to safely extract the youngest kid failed. There is an image of this e-mail interaction somewhere. So one of the world's most experienced cave divers had indeed given the team the thumbs-up; the guy telling Musk to shove the machine up his ass was thankfully not representing the rescue leadership.

There was apparently some sort of misunderstanding at the time. It would have been completely impossible for any sort of rigid submarine to fit through the cave restrictions. It was a total waste of effort.

Not calling them a pedophile?

Additionally, what kind of hubris is it to imagine you can help with a rescue you know little to nothing about, especially in a way that could be viewed as a PR stunt for one of your companies?

The proper response would have been for Elon to say: 'We were only trying to help. I am glad everyone got out ok, and respect what the divers did to make that happen. Perhaps what we built could be used in future situations and we are prepared to work with rescue organizations to see if that is feasible.'

If he had said that, everyone would have cheered him. Instead, he really began his slide off the cliff. Happily, he seems to have calmed down lately. At least, I haven't seen any serious missteps in the last few weeks.

If EMTs are treating a person who's severely bleeding and I come up and try to help I'm just going to get in the way. Musk should have let the professionals do their job. The sub was not remotely workable since it was too rigid for the cave's narrow passages, and Musk should have let it go.

The only person I'd believe hasn't called someone else a bad name is Fred Rogers.

If I judged my friends by that standard, I wouldn't have any.

"Bad name" is pretty disingenuous to describe his repeated insistence of such a horrible thing about a person based on nothing.

Calling him a curse word would have been 'fine'.

Even just coming back after a day or two and saying "I'm sorry, I should have called him [curse word of choice]" would be closer to acceptable.

Coming back to say "no, no, I'm dead serious" has no excuse.

(this exchange was hilarious at least https://1bht2ni6oc-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/upload...)

It's like we're completely ignoring the role that CA's clean car requirements and incentivies have had on the EV market, including making it possible for Tesla to exist in the first place, and for financially keeping Tesla afloat for the many years of failed execution under Elon's leadership.

SpaceX owes its success to Gwynne Shotwell, not Elon Musk. It's her ability to execute that has SpaceX on top.

AI has been a thing for decades. But it's cool to see Elon Musk take credit for yet another thing he didn't actually do.

How did CA state alone keep Tesla afloat?

Tesla has relied on CA ZEV credits to stay afloat at several points in its lifespan.

It has also relied on the CA clean car incentives to sell the Models S and 3. One of the major factors in the current popularity of Teslas is that a lot of its competition are no longer eligible for those incentives. This is why Wall Street has been so concerned about the end of the federal incentives in 2019.

This is like saying some company that was barely profitable only survived because of lower corporate taxes at the time. While technically true, it's just stating the economic reality that everyone dealt with at the time, and doesn't really impart much useful information. Any other company in the same market with a similar offering could just as easily have taken advantage of the incentives offered.

> Tesla has relied on CA ZEV credits to stay afloat at several points in its lifespan.

What are you trying to express here? I think you believe it is self explanatory, but it's not to me. Tesla took advantage of government incentives just as any other company with a similar offering could have (and did!). The original statement was that Tesla accelerated electric car deployments. CA definitely deserves a lot of credit for spurring that with incentives, but Tesla goes hand-in-hand with that. The incentives are also to encourage the market to provide good offerings in that space, which it responded and did. The reality shows that the major auto makers have been slow to respond with lackluster offerings until very recently (if even then).

While I agree with the gist of your argument, corporate taxes (mostly) apply to profits, and therefore have no influence on profitable/not profitable.

(Payroll, VAT, and some other taxes do have the effect you describe. To excuse my nitpicking: that confusion over corporate taxation has a somewhat outsized effect on typical discussions of tax policy)

> One of the major factors in the current popularity of Teslas is that a lot of its competition are no longer eligible for those incentives.

This is exactly backwards. Tesla was the first to use up its 200000 credits, back in July. GM is the second, in December. Everyone else has a long way to go before running out of incentives.

No, you have mixed up the incentives. The federal tax credit incentive expired. The California incentives, some of which are not tax related, still apply to Teslas.

I think the parent is talking about OpenAI[0] the company, not AI the academic space.

[0] https://openai.com/

Damn unlucky for everybody but him not to reap all those low-hanging fruits, I guess.

>>SpaceX proven out booster re-usability

That was proven long ago

By SpaceX

(Parent may be referring to Shuttle solid-rocket boosters. From what I've heard they were as expensive to reuse as to manufacture from scratch. In other words, they found the break-even point, which is something good at least.)

It is much easier to accomplish things if that's your sole intent and purpose in life—at the expense of many otherwise valued traits of being a human.

Perhaps only a little easier. I've known so many jerks in my life and none were Elon Musk.

> Perhaps only a little easier. I've known so many jerks in my life and none were Elon Musk.

This would be a classic example of mixing up causation and correlation.

Although your wording is specific enough I can't tell if that's entirely on purpose and there's some joke I'm not seeing...

Edit: lol, actually I think I just missed the "so" in your comment, which noticing it now makes me read it entirely differently.

How much easier is "much easier"?

If this was true there would be astoundingly more world-changing technologies, given the sheer number of people out there who abandon otherwise valued traits of being human.

I've seen what's happened to Musk happen to people who have seen the dark side of life.

"took him for a cool $1 billion" is quite a way to spin it. https://jezebel.com/5637920/the-special-hell-of-being-a-star...

> I wouldn't want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.

I fail to see the merit of such a condemnation without additional context.

Though I question the validity of it to begin with unless you at least also claim that there are people who you have a similar level of optics on (i.e. "I see them on TV") and actually DO want to have them in one of those roles based on this perception.

...why wouldn't you want to be his friend?

Do you know him? He is the subject of constant hit jobs from his enemies.

Where "hit jobs" means "critical reporting," and "enemies" means "journalists."

I'm not talking about journalists, I'm talking about you Andrew :)

They call themselves "$TSLAQ" and spend all day fantasizing about Tesla going bankrupt.

This is a great example of exactly what I'm talking about.

https://twitter.com/arbissell

Date him, or marry him, okay. Friend, dunno -- people are complicated. But family member? That's a bit harsh.

> I wouldn't want to be his friend, date him, marry him, or have him as a family member.

Your life wouldn't be boring.

I hope you're not implying that my life is boring, as that would be rude.

And wrong.

You seem pretty defensive for someone who made rude and probably wrong implications about Elon in this same thread.

If A implies B, it does not follow that notA implies notB.

One of my previous managers worked with Elon Musk. He was a CTO at one of his past companies.

When I asked him what he was like to be around, he said it's been over 10 years and all I remember about him is thinking "this guy is fucking weird".

You can't make that judgment without actually knowing Elon without being completely superficial and willing to be swayed by media reports of him.

I generally agree, but I also think it's important to note that SpaceX has underperformed its target on launches and therefore revenue in 2018: It had a target of 30 launches, and has only seen about 20 this year, roughly the same as 2017. The increase of $3billion+ dollar on it's valuation since its last round therefore appears to be despite underperforming targets rather than actual increase in either revenue or profits (to the best such are publicly discernible for a private company)

That's a good point. Still, I can see reasons for raising it's perceived value over last year.

A year ago, Falcon Heavy still hadn't launched. Will that happen in 2018? Ever? We didn't know.

A year ago, we were still barely a year since the 2016 pad explosion- is this going to happen again? How often? What if it happens tomorrow?

And most importantly, we've doubled (ish?) the number of landings. With more data, we've got a better estimate on the expected future success rate.

SpaceX is becoming a less risky investment. There was always a valuation hit because of that risk.

Given the advances they've made in the past year I think 10% is a conservative estimate of the change in valuation. And, as others have said, if Starlink pans out then they will effectively corner the market on broadband internet, which is a massive multi-billion dollar industry.

The increased valuation also has to do with its Starlink satellite-based network access service, quite possibly a larger and much more profitable business than rockets, making huge strides.

How do you say they have a 5-10 year advantage over Electron/Rocket Lab? They've already done a commercial launch and have 11 launches scheduled for 2019. They could very well be a viable competitor with a strong cost and time flexibility advantage in 2020.

SpaceX has a huge payload advantage over Rocket Lab, but small satellites currently pay a lot of the bills at SpaceX...

Electron and Falcon 9 have have entirely different capabilities. Electron may be more flexible but it's unable to launch geosynchronous satellites, which are by far the most profitable in the launch industry.

I was going to say something similar. I love Electron, they have an awesome rocket and have made it to orbit so they are winners in my book. That said, they are poking at a different market than SpaceX is, which is the small rocket, small payload to orbit. Yes it's a market, no it isn't particularly high margin (at this time, these tend to be cube sats with more modest budgets).

What is worse, they still throw away the rocket once they launch. A "gas only" Falcon 9 rocket (which is to say they have the means to launch and relaunch over 10 times) is ultimately going to be the most cost effective path to space. Not sure Electron can get there from here.

I don't know if a re-usable Electron will ever make sense, but it's an interesting engineering problem to think about.

As lithium-ion batteries improve the potential mass fraction for each Electron stage gets better: lighter batteries mean more propellant. In a decade (maybe sooner) it might become feasible for the first stage to retain enough propellant for a propulsive landing like the Falcon 9. And in this case I think there's a big pay-off with the electric pumps: there's no need for a hoverslam, since the engines should be able to deep throttle to an extreme degree that's not practical with conventional rocket engines.

In a shorter time-frame the Electron first stage, because it is so small, is probably air-recoverable using the same approach that ULA is considering for recovering Vulcan engines.

Along those lines I think the hypersonic parachute work is also a potential game changer. High strength, low mass, materials with high thermal coefficients (like graphene) might one day be able to spread enough of the re-entry energy across a large enough surface to make it something you could do to recover. The steerable parafoils that SpaceX is putting on the payload fairings for terminal guidance.

A fun engineering problem to be sure.

An interesting part of the article says

"SpaceX’s existing business faces headwinds. It expects to see declines in launches of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for 2019 and perhaps 2020. Global demand for launching commercial satellites, its core business, is stagnant, with some satellite manufacturers and customers looking to permanently exit the market segment."

Commercial satellites is broad - does the above mean that the market is stagnant for high orbit geosynchronous? If that's the case, then the advantage would be to Electron - but that assumes something about the profitability of low orbit.

A reference, where the WSJ got this information, would have been nice.

Otoh there are capabilities - and many distinctions between SpaceX and Electron. On the other though is the market and demand and you could have something great but if its market isn't likewise then you're going to be hampered not on the, shall we say, supply side of the rocket you offer, but rather the demand side.

Commercial GEO is declining. Cell networks are becoming good enough that they can beat out satellite network providers. Same with TV networks, why bother with a satellite uplink when you can stream 4K over the internet?

Since spaceX’s first commercial launch was in 2013, I’d say GP was not entirely wrong

SpaceX has been launching the Falcon 9 for the past 6 years straight with only two launch failures and one partial failure out of 65 flights. Their older Falcon 1 didn't do great, only last flight survived out of five tries. However, SpaceX has had near consecutive launch success for the past 10 years. They threw themselves into the deep end with space. They do things the cheap and quick way and hope that it works. When it fails, they can quickly reconfigure and try again, their investment is low. This model helps you get really far really quick, so much so that they are now competing with ULA. ULA's tech has heritage all the way back to the Convair days when slapping a satellite onto an ICBM was a new idea. All of those small companies like Rocket Lab are just starting their success but this is literally where SpaceX was 10 years prior, launching small stuff with mixed results. If SpaceX can get off the ground with 20% success rate of their first design, I doubt Rocket Lab will have trouble with 80%.

Falcon 1 launched successfully on the last 2 flights (F1-4 & F1-5). But only F1-5 had a paying customer. F1-4 was a dummy test payload.

Electron is roughly equivalent to SpaceX's Falcon 1. Falcon 1 flew its first (and only) commercial flight in 2009. That's ~10 years, by my math...

What if electron is already near its final form? That would put them near parity with Falcon 9 in terms of development, but without the proven track record yet. Just saying the goals are different and progress toward them has to be measured based on those goals.

Cessna doesn't compete with Boeing, and it's not clear Electron and SpaceX are playing the same game either.

In that case they are not competitors. Either they are 9+ years behind or they are not even in the same race.

That’s not a bad thing. Boeing for example is also a profitable aerospace company, but they don’t launch to GEO. You basicly pay a near constant rate per lb to orbit and most of the money is from the large side of thing.

Well they do kinda launch to geo in their partnership with LM in ULA.

Electron is a tiny rocket and the market for large launchers is already overstacked. Electron will stay in the microlaunch market for a long time.

Despite a lot of small satellites going up on SpaceX rockets, they aren't the ones pulling in large amounts of money for SpaceX. Most of the small satellite launches (with the exception of the recent SSO-A mission) are secondary payloads on a larger launch.

There is a lot of demand for smaller launchers. With smaller launch vehicles you can get more flexibility in what orbit you want to go in to. On the larger launches, the small satellite manufacturers have to adapt somewhat to the launches that are available. There is demand from both the commercial and DoD [1].

[1] https://spacenews.com/pentagon-procurement-chief-ellen-lord-...

Electric motor fuel pumps simply cannot scale any larger than they already are on the Electron craft. Rocket labs is not going to be taking any of SpaceX's profitable marketshare.

I wouldn't be surprised if they start working on an expander cycle engine while keeping the electrics as a starter/regulator.

> but small satellites currently pay a lot of the bills at SpaceX

No, they really don't. SpaceX makes most of their money launching 3-ton+ geostationary satellites. The second-most important workload has been launching the Orbcomm and Iridium constellations. Iridium satellites won't fit on Electron. Orbcomm ones would, but the constellation is complete.

Of all their commercial launches, on only one would the Electron rocket have undeniably been better: The SmallSat Express was a kind of a clusterfuck because there were too many customers on one launch, each with their own problems and delays.

In any case, hypotheticals about SpaceX losing customers in the future always need to be answered with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IU41zpzWUE&t=75s

As of IAC2018, they had a $12B launch manifest. They can afford to lose a few smallsat payloads.

I am eagerly awaiting a future larger Electron. The principle of 3d-printing a rocket using only parts that are cheap to make is quite interesting, and might have room to move up to payloads larger than smallsats.

Electron is not reusable, each is expended.

Reusability will eventually give SpaceX such an edge that they'll be able to launch BFR at Electron-level prices. Same cost, an order of magnitude more capability.

This is quite a ways out, however, so Rocketlab will enjoy being the only dedicated provider at the $6M price point for quite a while.

More like four order of magnitude more payload...

I think the company is great and it's been a big inspiration.

I'm a bit worried, however, about the CEO using it as a piggy-bank for other projects only partially related to SpaceX, and whether I'd see any payback on that risk if I were an investor (See: Boring Company using SpaceX folks to dig tunnels).

I'm perfectly fine not being an investor and instead just being a fan.

If you want to perform at the absolute limit of your ability, you must regularly go past your limits. If you want to bring your whole self to that job, you must push limits in every aspect of your life.

It's not for everyone, but it's the reason why Musk is so successful. He goes right up to the line, and then tries to step just a tiny bit over. Sometimes he ends up flagrantly in the danger zone, but just as often he finds out the line was much further out than anyone suspected.

You can do the same thing socially, by letting crazy people randomly test boundaries, and then using a social network to filter best practices down to you. That way you get the benefit of random testing, without risking any of your personal health or reputation. But that takes decades, whereas Elon's strategy gives immediate feedback.

He has so much privilege that he can be quite risky without actually "betting the farm" so to speak. If he was a little less mentally healthy, a little less white, a little less male, a little less rich parents, a little less educated, etc he'd probably have flamed out with this strategy. Having that intersection of privilege gives him a nice safety net when his experiments blow up. There's a whole other layer of support beyond the business fundamentals.

The thing I’ve always liked about him, is he actually did bet the farm when he could have had a very easy life. Not sure I could have done it.

And he keeps betting it!

That’s demonsratably a bad idea when it comes to exercise and likely most other things in life. Limits are not binary, you are causing harm when you approach them. Going over just means the injury is more noticeable.

What’s really interesting is if you study the absolute top athletes is they treat down time as both nessisary and productive.

Absolute peak performance is simply not sustainable, you need to adjust to a huge range of tradeoffs.

But top athletes also exercise far more than other people.

Most people don't exercise enough, so that's no surprise. The important thing is that top athletes don't exercise as much as they possibly could because doing so would be counterproductive.

They have also spent years building up the capacity to exercise as much as they do. If you go straight from an office job lifestyle to top athlete levels of effort, you'll get injured.

I agree 100%. The expected outcome is not good. But the range of possible outcomes goes higher than being smart about it.

If you want to perform at the absolute limit of your ability, then knowing where you might benefit from pushing your limits is far more useful than mere recklessness.

And a 47 year old tweeting about "420" and his critics being "pedos" isn't someone with a "strategy" seeking "immediate feedback" where others "take decades", even where their tweets are in a sufficiently harmless space for them not to lose a measure of control over their company and find themself on the end of bad press and lawsuits as a result. It's someone who somehow managed not to learn something the majority of other 47 year olds learned three decades ago and/or someone who has failed to exercise control of their behaviour in an arena where they had little to gain and everything to lose.

You can make a case for assholery over details being integral to getting results even at the expense of relationships, but not self-destructive social media tomfoolery Musk didn't even indulge in for most of his career.

I guess above all I'm just glad nobody hero worships me enough to rationalise my own acts of utter stupidity as next-level, boundary-pushing genius. (I guess the flip side is I didn't found SpaceX, but you win some, you lose some :-)

You can invest in SpaceX. They regularly are available on secondary market places.

Can you elaborate? I assume you have to be an accredited investor?

Often in these sorts of scenarios you can find an investment fund that has a stake in the non-public company that you are interested in and invest in the company by proxy by investing in the fund.

the issue would now be that you're investing in everything else in that fund.. i'd have to believe in the fund, not just SpaceX.

You could design a portfolio of short and long positions that exactly cancelled out everything else the fund had.

I smell a SaaS product…

I smell financial regulation. The secondary market is generally only available to accredited investors. If you're investing in a fund, that's one thing, but if a product is unwinding all of that to allow unsophisticated investors to essentially buy secondary stock in private companies, the SEC is going to have something to say about that.

Good luck with that considering most if not all of the other investments would be private investments that would be difficult, if not impossible to replicate in public markets.

Maybe you could find a bunch of other funds with slightly different positions in the same companies, and then form a linear combination that cancelled out the differences.

You'd end up with an "error portfolio" that was somewhat random that you'd be investing in proportionally with your SpaceX investment.

If I started a few listed companies and bought carefully constructed portfolios of unlisted securities specifically so that this would be possible, I wonder if the SEC would get mad.

Wow! Do you happen to know any reputable ones where it'd be possible to single out (as much as possible, probably not possible completely) the investment into SpaceX?

Fundnel, a Singaporean crowdfunding platform was assisting spaceX with a recent raise[1]. The minimum investment value is 250k on the website now but if I recall correctly it was as low as 50k a few months back.

[1] https://fundnel.com/investor/deal-feed/funded

Just because SpaceX is doing well doesn't mean it's a good investment. The valuation seems fair or even too high considering the profit opportunities.

Depends entirely on whether you think Starlink will succeed or not. (And by proxy, BFR, because Starlink cannot be economically deployed on F9.)

SpaceX is a lot bigger than just Starlink... I'd say you'd have to buy into the whole vision to consider it a good investment.

If Starlink succeeds, it can easily deliver recurring revenues of >$5B yearly. This will dwarf all the other revenue sources SpaceX will have in the next few decades, and easily justify the current valuation (and even a substantially higher one, for that matter).

The moment Musk made the call on Starlink, he made all the other ambitions of SpaceX conditional on it. If Starlink succeeds, they can fund Mars colonization out of petty cash.

People said the same about Iridium. It's entirely possible that Starlink could work as advertised but not have subscribers to deliver that level of profitability.

20 million global Internet access subscribers would mean at least $15-$20 billion in revenue (assuming Starlink can't fetch the prices globally that they will be able to in the US access market). Starlink will definitely be a large business if it's successful, although their early projections on potential were outlandish. Comcast is a reasonable target for scaling comparisons.

Comcast access + tv is essentially a US only business. They have something like 26 million access subscribers and 22 million cable tv subscribers. The access business alone is good for $25-$30 billion per year in sales. They've accomplished that scale just in the US market. A bunch of medium income and developed nations still have relatively slow Internet access, including France and Australia. There are an easy ten million Starlink customers waiting just in the giant US market.

Starlink will never fund a Mars colony out of petty cash though. It'll take nearly every dollar of profit the business generates to establish a Mars colony.

You are estimating the average Starlink customer at 1000 USD/year? That seems significantly above average mobile and landline Internet fees, so it would seem hard to acquire 20 million customers while competing with those?

“Basic” cable internet where I am is $90/mo, after the initial contract runs out. That’s $1000/yr.

Where I am 150MB/s fiber internet is for ~$12 a month :)

edit: what I was going for is, you can't take that number and extrapolate it to the whole world

The average cost in US for land-line Internet seems to be 66USD, and is among the highest in the world. Source: https://howmuch.net/articles/cost-of-broadband-internet

Apparently the average phone bill is 80USD/month. Again some of the highest in the world. https://www.moneysavingpro.com/cell-phone-plans/comparing-us...

>If Starlink succeeds, they can fund Mars colonization out of petty cash.

I would be interested in reading about the economics of this. Can you point to such an article?

> If I could invest in SpaceX, I would.

I wouldn't because I don't trust Elon Musk's honesty with investors.

Also, I don't understand the argument "I would invest because positive thing X" - how does it imply that buying the company at market price is more profitable than buying a stock index?

I should rephrase: if I could buy SpaceX with the company valued at only $30B, I would buy stock in it. That seems undervalued to me, given the above. I believe the company will be worth more than that in both the short and long term and therefore it's a solid investment.

For the same reasons that some people choose to divest themselves from companies which they have personal moral disagreements with, some people want to invest in companies that directly or indirectly align with their views. I don't believe the comment above was meant to be taken as a purely financial move.

Most recently he diverted SpaceX resources to the boring company without board approval....

I dunno, I don't think he's "burned out" in the same sense that you or I get burned out, but I do think he's "over exposed", which for him is probably basically the same.

It just looks like he's gotten comfortable expressing the thoughts and feelings that most of us try to apply at least a small filter to, and it's hard because he's the boss of his world, so there's no one to reel him in.

On [2] note that they still technically consider landings "experimental" or at least "beta." Launch success is mission success.

Is that true? They used to label it something like “experimental landing” on the timeline, but lately it’s just been “landing”.

>> massively undercutting the legacy competitors (ULA)...

I think that has been a mistake. Undercut them sure, but if they charged more they might not be seeking funding right now. They should be optimizing profit at this point (to fund new developments) and it's not clear that's what they're doing. I've never heard them talk about pricing other than what they charge and how they hope to lower those costs.

Hard to sell your workers on changing the game when you've got that mindset. They get some of the best because they actually want to change the way access to space works.

> They get some of the best because they actually want to change the way access to space works.

Are they really that concerned with getting "the best"? From what I've heard, they expect you to work insane hours. That pretty much limits potential employees to those without a family or a life outside of work.

Won't they just end up with the majority of their employees without significant experience this way?

In many ways though I guess it operates very much like a startup. They sell dreams to get employees.

Anecdata and probably subject to some sort of bias, but of the only two people I know who have interned there (one personally, and one via open source contributions), the first was specifically called out as "the smartest person I've ever met" by our founders when we were acquired, and the second is Sergio Benitez[1].

[1]: https://sergio.bz/

> of the only two people I know who have interned there

I don't think you're disagreeing with me. I assume those people were relatively young since they interned there?

I was not at all trying to imply they don't have talented people working there. It sounds like a great opportunity and honestly anyone who is willing to spend so much time on their craft should get good at it over time.

I am just trying to say that they are also probably missing out on many talented people who don't want to commit so much time to work.

I mean it's working out for them clearly. It seems they consider dedication to be more important than "talent" and I wouldn't necessarily say that's wrong. I only work in software which may be different but it's rare to encounter problems which require some sort of ingenuity. Most of the time work just involves.. putting in time and effort to get things done.

I suppose in a broad sense we agree then. My point was that if that's the kind of person you're bringing through the door, it's a bit academic to point out that there are other good people who disagree with how you've organized the place and won't work there. The way I'm thinking about it, that disagreement only actually matters if it's the constraint on your organization's ability to get the people you need (however you choose to define that).

I would not work SpaceX hours even though I'm a big fan. They're hiring engineers better than I, though, so I think that's a shrugworthy footnote from their perspective.

I know a lot of current and former SpaceX employees, and can say that while they definitely used to get the best people (including a number of steals from JPL), the sheer hours has definitely negatively impacted their ability to hire the best.

A number of truly genius engineers won't even consider SpaceX anymore because they're married/have children and simply won't put up with the hours.

SpaceX still does a good job of bringing in stellar new graduates, but the lack of experience among so much of their workforce has definitely hampered their R&D.

>> Hard to sell your workers on changing the game when you've got that mindset.

I don't think the workers would care if a launch cost $10-50M more than it does. If I worked there it would make me uneasy that they're looking for more funding for a mere $500M. It already makes me uneasy (and I don't work there) since I really want them to succeed with BFR and their Mars ambitions.

They are deemed as far riskier.

If you are flying a $20 million dollar satalite, do you fly with the 6 million dollar proven launch, or the 5.999 million dollar unproven launch?

Now if the unproven guy cuts the price to 3 million dollars, the math changes (insurance can step in, etc).

I don't think they could have charged much more and gotten to where they are.

The price difference between ULA and SpaceX is much larger than that. In 2018 it was $200M (ULA) to $83M (SpaceX).

https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/16/us-air-force-spacex-ula-...

They've also increased prices now that they're proven.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/27/spacex-price-hikes-iss-r...

Add to that ULA was forced to drop their prices, so Space-X doesn't really have much room to increase more. And they obviously can't increase on existing contracts.

I'm always shocked when a keyboard warrior on ycombinator thinks a company that size doesn't have a considerable workforce dedicated to figuring out what they can charge for their product... I doubt they just picked a number out of thin air. It was likely a combination of estimating how low they think their competitors go as well as where they need to be to win new business.

Plus, if you are going to bring the BFR online with much lower launch costs, you want people to start thinking about that reality sooner rather that later. SpaceX will have lots of their own satellites to launch, but if they are hoping to do a launch or more a day they will need to have a lot more people putting things into space. A lower price now can jumpstart lots of money into building businesses that with need those lower prices.

What's the comparison on insurance rates between the two?

But the price of satellites is also much higher. A GEO commset made to common specs is going to be costing something north of $100 million. A custom DoD spysat might be in the billions. SpaceX is making very good inroads in the former but not the later.

Atlas V prices are listed at $109 million.

https://www.ulalaunch.com/rockets/atlas-v

Falcon 9 is $62 million (and I believe that’s the expendable version, you get a discount if the mission allows for booster recovery).

https://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities

The fact that these prices are publically available on their websites tells you something about the state of competition in the launch industry.

Electron (RocketLab, actually) is chasing a wildly different market segment.

> If I could invest in SpaceX, I would.

So true! I would love to invest in SpaceX

Why at this valuation do you think it's attractive? $30.5 billion is a hell of a price to pay for a business with only around $2 billion in revenue.

Because you expect the revenue to go up dramatically in the future.

The main reason for that belief, at least for me, is Starlink.

that + mining asteroids w/ boring company tech

If that is their projected revenue source, I think most of us would agree that SpaceX is over valued

maybe most of HN, but i'm not so sure about the majority of small dreamers on reddit who like investing

I'm not sure that is who I want valuing companies

See Bloomberg today: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

Still sure?

Genius, yes. Ambitious, yes. Good governance, no!

Any evidence of actual investors being upset about this? The only actual quote from the wsj article:

"Founders Fund in a statement said it has been briefed on the relationship between SpaceX and the Boring Co. “and we have no concerns whatsoever."

> burned himself out

I'll say. hits blunt

“I think he's overworked and burned-out”

It’s just PR he’s not sleeping under desks or delusional from sleep deprivation or etc

It’s just PR to get to this moment, raising a huge round for SpaceX.

Delivering a 100(starting a billion USD company successfully ? ) times smaller projects on time can give nightmare for years. What he is doing is borderline impossible.

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