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Comment by sargun | Hacker News Reader

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?

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