It's such a shame this company is not traded publicly. I would be willing to risk a couple of thousand of euros and bet on them being successful in the long run. A company like this has nearly infinite potential for growth.
Other examples are Uber, DoorDash, Lucid Motors, etc... money losing companies with nosebleed valuations because investors believe in the long term.
Going public has an extreme risk of deviating from that goal in favor of more profitable activities. He won't do it.
Non-SaaS, non-tech platforms and non-biotech companies have a really hard marketcap ceiling.
SpaceX builds stuff in the real world, macrostuff with millions of moving parts, that's like black death for economic margins, they also aim to go into an environment such as space which is very hard and has slapped us time and time again.
There is no convetional ROI for us up there, there maybe is in the form of artificial economics such as the morale boost that the country gets when a rocket goes up.
But if that's the case the US could just push for having the Olympics every 2 years given that it sweeps the gold medals everytime.
A 200k usd on a public SpaceX is a bet on Musk being able to convince people other than yourself that SpaceX is in fact a tech-platform a SaaS or a biotech.
Revenue is projected to be 3 billion this year, projected to be 10 billion by 2025. You also get Starlink with it, which is valued at 10 billion by itself.
At 10x revenue, it is valued similar to Facebook, Microsoft and Google.
Last time I checked the important metric in business is revenue - cost of goods sold
If they are approximately the same you are just running a big operation, not a profitable business. And I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, being at the helm of a big operation feels great and gives the master of the ship a lot of meaning, but it's not a profitable enterprise.
Even SaaS, bio-tech and platforms feel the pain and the anxiety every minute they spend without being profitable.
Despite what the CEOs say, it's like being underwater, you can be optimistic about your ability to swim towards the surface, but still you got to get there.
You need both revenue growing and costs staying flat or just slightly increasing
Only the SaaS, biotech and platforms get a free pass, because the rationale is that once you become the dominant player , drive everybody out of business and kill competitors in the cradle thanks to your strategy aimed at acquiring marketshare...you'd then be able to sweep the market because you'd found yourself in a monopoly or quasi-monopoly regime, thanks to the network effects and a huge first mover advantage.
No matter what Musk says : cars and rockets aren't tech-platforms.
Of course you can bet on his ability to convince people other than yourself that they are, but that is a social engineering bet, on the charisma and the salesman ability of mr. Musk, it's not an enterprise or a business bet.
Nothing wrong with social engineering bets, they are the most profitable ones and you can ride on the way up and all the way down, like Thiel and Robert Mercer did with Trump for example.
It's not like they believed he'd Make America Great Again, they believed he could convince people other than themselves that he'd do so.
What is the global spend on space launches annually? $5 billion maybe? And not growing very quickly, if at all. And most of that market is inaccessible because many of the biggest space agencies prefer to keep things in-house, even if it means a worse product at a higher cost.
Reading other people's minds is not yet possible :( , for everything else there's AQR, RenTech and D.E. Shaw.
Is this true? It’s been my dream to use it on a boat and be able to work from there, but my understanding was that you had to have the satellite dish in a permanent fixed location on land.
EDIT: looking at that map, it's better to say that Puerto Rico can not get a connection from Miami, but Cuba can.
The world is getting more and more urbanized.
We won't leave cities because of the remote work. Humans feel the need to be together socially. Now there are 2 schools of thoughts about work;
one says that working is a social activity and thus remote work is doomed (IBM tried and failed before the pandemic)
The other says that working is just working.
Now even if the proponents of the latter are right and the whole world were to switch to 100% remote work you'd still would want to be living in NYC or LA for the social scene.
If anything the big winners are going to be the megalopolis where the social scene is more vibrant and people are more open compared to NYC and LA.
Thinking about Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paolo, Bogotà...at least for Americans who can speak Spanish.
They have Fiber down there, but sure there are niches such as the new Aerion supersonic plane, but is that enough?
For values of dying that include an unserved market of about 2 billion people in Africa and Asia.
Lagos, Nigeria will be home to 88M people in 2100, Kinshasa, RDC 72M.
I don't care how bad their infrastructure is now, running fiber in such a high density populated are will always be better than relying on internet via satellite.
Despite the growth of the large cities, most African urbanization is due to villages growing past a threshold where they are statistically counted as towns (IIRC 10 000 inhabitants), and therefore as urban, though. "Greater Lagos", the coastal-urban strip running from Abidjan in the west to Port Harcourt/Douala in the east, is mostly like this: villages that grew.
* Most African population growth is still going to be outside these megacities, and even within them, only the centres will have much infrastructure, unless there is massive social change leading to institutional reform.
Edit: clarifying this, which I should have done first: The majority of the population for at least the next 40 years will be in areas with population density below about 1000 people per square km, where Starlink is viable but laid cable is expensive.[1]
1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/02/starlink-is-a-... under the heading "Architecture".
HN is a bubble in a bubble, ask around, 99.999999% of the population will tell you they don't give a fuck about starlink and even less of a fuck about remote work and "digital nomadism".
So only about 100 people on Earth care about internet connectivity in remote places?
Being early = being wrong.
Seems you are disregarding competition, regulations and lots of other unknown unknowns here. As for a hypothetical listing, the investors themselves are there to make back their investment. To do this, they sell 'some' of their shares for a profit.
If they were to list, I won't be surprised to see the stock being heavily manipulated by the institutional investors just to catch the retail traders out.