Is there a way for a mortal to buy or invest into SpaceX or are we just waiting for an IPO eventually?
Otherwise, I doubt it. Elon has been pretty vocal about regretting making Tesla public. Additionally SpaceX as a company is oriented around putting humans on mars. Until that happens, I expect a supermajority of ownership would be against the profit seeking motives that an IPO creates.
Short of investing in them, you could look for companies in industries that are likely to benefit from cheaper space access. Might have an easier time there.
I've been investing heavily in domestic tooling, manufacturing and construction. Screw chasing only SpaceX, wouldn't you also like to capitalize on things like our gigantic semiconductor mfg build-out?
Playing the supply chain is often times better than having direct access to the thing you want exposure to. It's just not as fun for certain elements of the monkey brain to operate one or two degrees removed.
It's like fish in a barrel if you have patience to sort through the information and type fake contact info into investor web forms to get at presentation materials.
You definitely don't need a Bloomberg terminal subscription to do this stuff.
Do we like being added to arbitrary contact lists?
Read about the rest of his career and I think you'll figure it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
They were very close. Elon named his first born son Griffin.
Mike Griffin is all about putting (eventually) hypersonic weapons in space and resurrecting Brilliant Pebbles.
He was the early advocate for reusable launchers https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/may99/r... and the Falcon name came from his DARPA Falcon Project.
Now, to do that, they'll need to scratch the government's back. Doesn't mean that Mars isn't priority #1.
To be more precise, the company is run by the DoD with significant technical and financial assistance. Elon is the main conduit between those deep resource and the rest of the company. He regularly meets with all teams to ensure they are aligned with "higher purposes".
To be even more precise, Elon is a front-man for a right-wing multi-decade program in American hegemony and actualizing it's crowning achievement--the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Musk wants to build a Mars colony. DOD wants Brilliant Pebbles / SDI. Perhaps a trade can be made? You'll need much of the same tech for each.
If SpaceX is run by DOD, why is it not run by DOD? Why pretend otherwise? The best engineers won't work to build SDI? Thousands work for Boeing/Lockheed. They're all that much worse?
both of these cannot be true at the same time.
No, the internet isn't a hive mind, and is never going to have simple unitary opinions except as rare coincidence.
> both of these cannot be true at the same time.
And yet a planet-scale information network can easily include voices that believe each of them simultaneously, because people disagree.
Look at Starship objectively. It's not a Mars rocket. That bellyflop through the atmosphere stunt won't work on Mars, and man-rating it even for operation around Earth is extremely dubious. The habitats which would supposedly be used for Mars colonization don't exist and aren't in development, so if you think Starship is a Mars rocket you should realize that it's a bridge to nowhere. Starship is being developed to launch tons of satellites cheap. It makes a lot of sense for that and it makes zero sense for Mars colonization.
Given the weight of the circumstantial evidence, particularly the entirety of Michael Griffin's career and role in SpaceX's existence, it is more reasonable to assume they're lying about Mars than to assume Mars is the true motivation. Your prior for Elon Musk lying about anything should be through the roof anyway.
I'm only an enthusiastic layman on the topic of spacefaring, but isn't the launch vehicle a critical variable when designing habitats for other planets? It doesn't seem practical to take anything much further than paper until the constraints of your launch vehicle are known.
Habitats designed to be launched on Starship+Superheavy are going to be wildly different from those made to launch on practically anything else because of the vast difference in lift capacity and available volume. To add to that, it arguably doesn't make sense to develop habitats at all unless something similar to Starship is flying.
So from that perspective, it would seem to me logical to wait and see if SpaceX can actually make Starship+Superheavy work or not before committing to anything. No point in burning money on something that'll never be practical to launch.
> To add to that, it arguably doesn't make sense to develop habitats at all unless something similar to Starship is flying.
It doesn't make sense developing Starship unless you have paying customers lined up. Launching satellite constellations is a market that actually exists, Mars colonization doesn't and won't for decades at least, by which time Starship will likely be obsolete anyway.
Furthermore, you're ignoring the part where Starship isn't a Mars rocket and doesn't even resemble a Mars rocket. If Elon Musk had never spoken of Mars, there would be zero reason to suspect that Starship was meant to be a Mars rocket. His words alone are the basis for this belief. How much are his words actually worth to you?
There is work on suits, life support systems and lots of other things.
Your whole argument is basically 'its hard' and SpaceX doesnt have perfectly worked out plan to solve every single problem. Yeah no shit shirlock.
And Starship is a Mars rocket. Your evidence for that non existant. SpaceX has presented Mars entery and landing profiles. Refueling makes it perfect for Mars.
I tend to trust the people who have actually engineer such systems, have built hardware and have simulations.
The claim that its all a conspiricy theory is simply not credible. Honestly just make yourself look ridicoulus.
> In December 2008, with SpaceX again on the verge of bankruptcy, Griffin awarded SpaceX along with his own Orbital Sciences company each contracts with a combined value of $3.5 billion
It's crazy how nepotism is still such an important aspect of success today.
It's very likely had they never known each other, SpaceX would not exist today, and some other company would have thrived instead.
I also don't understand how it's not a conflict of interest to award his own company that contract?
This kind of inside dealing is just the status quo in american businesses today. Every CEO is on the board of the companies where their board members are CEOs. Really easy to get your board to approve a comp increase when they know you will do the same for them.
Big business is a social club and you ain't in it.
This is one of the most successful contract in history.
Griffin didnt invente COTS, that was anouter group that had been wanting to do a program like that and Griffin was just the administrator.
To you have actual evidence the Griffin as administrator actually overwrote the technical comities making these choices in order to help SpaceX.
If you dont have that evidence then you are just full of shit talking out of your ass.
Considering the nature and role of the LEO constellation Michael Griffin wants to build, remember Elon Musk's talk about "preventing extinction". Ostensibly he's talking about making a 'backup' population of humanity on Mars, but that makes zero sense. Serious customers for Mars colonization don't actually exist and SpaceX hasn't invested in the development of Mars habitat technology themselves. What they're actually doing is developing boosters capable of launching proliferated LEO constellations for feasible amounts of money (a capability SpaceX is now demonstrating with Starlink.)
You act as if there was some short cut around that. There isnt. So your argument just fundamentally doesnt work.
What would SpaceX invest in refueling if LEO is all they cared about?
That's laughable, because without making Tesla public he wouldn't be able to live the superstar uber rich lifestyle he thinks he deserves. Pretty much everything he has personally is owed to Tesla public valuation.
to be fair that lifestyle was enabled for the rest of his life in the paypal days. i don't think anything he does now is driven by getting a new car or eating at a fancier restaurant. He's been able to have as luxurious lifestyle as possible for a long time.
PayPal's money wouldn't even be enough to get him a sports team.
Search for the word 'excessive' https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/hist...
Griffin is arguing against himself there in giving all that money-- covering his tail. The important part if you read the contracts is a majority of the money was awarded before SpaceX built any hardware, they just had to present plans and half the money was transferred. Elon never risked his own money as all the costs were covered up front and if they failed they would only lose the other half of the contract.
Elon was very scrappy and cheap in the initial builds because he didn't want to risk his own cash.
For Tesla, besides the huge DOE grant, he had SpaceX loan some of the excess government money to Tesla in the first few years to derisk his investment there as well.
Besides that, there are plenty of firms taking government money but Elon actually delivered.
Read the links above, this is not speculation.
You haven't refuted my points of him not owning anything indicative of his 'uber-rich' lifestyle, and considering the amount of work he is very visibly doing, I see no reason to somehow assume he's just laying around buying stuff for the heck of it.
> Several supercars in the past Valid point - I remember seeing him crash his McLaren. That was, however, 20 years ago, and have seen no indications of him indulging in any supercars or anything of the sorts in the past 10 years.
>Goes on stage with a famous comedian Seems to be more of an attention-seeking thing as opposed to a luxury lifestyle.
This is an Interval Fund - effectively a mutual fund except that you can only sell it one day per quarter due to limited liquidity.
Mortality Assessments are left as an exercise for the reader.
Some other ways:
- Invest in a company or fund that owns a significant chunk of SpaceX (like Google, Bank of America).
- Convince an insider to part with their shares (either directly or through one of the secondary marketplaces).
- Get a job at SpaceX.
The equity upside at hire # 12,001, when the market cap is $150B... is probably not great.
I mean it might be a ton of fun, I just wouldn't do it for the 100x returns.
By many historical metrics, the stock markets are insanely overvalued these days. Far too much cash in the system, bidding up the "values" of anything that remotely resembles an investment.
Right. This is the same stock market that at one point said Tesla was worth more than every other car manufacturer. Combined.
Worth more than: Toyota, Volkwagen Group, Hyundai/Kia, General Motors, Ford, Nissan, Honda, Fiat Chrysler, Renault, Suzuki, Daimler, BMW, Mazda and Mitsubishi. Combined. (Plus several Chinese manufacturers: SAID, Geely, Changan, Dongfeng).
SpaceX is insanely overvalued.
But anyway, op used P/E ratio to justify spacex valuation, in a totally wrong way. Their P/E ratio is in thousands (assuming there’s no creative accounting to show that profit, as they have many money burning projects and keep on raising billions). And they own a lot of the market and market itself isn’t growing fast.
You can justify their valuation with lofty goals and mission, if that’s your thing. But not with financial numbers and market sizes.
False.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aoRFnOFX_CzxTTOFLl8h...
Note that this significantly understates market growth because Amazon's 83 launch deal did not include SpaceX, as Starlink is a competitor.
Weight to orbit isn’t number of lunches. They’ve been doing around 30 per year, for paying customer, for many years now. And one of deals may push it higher, like Amazon, but so far they didn’t show ability to sustainably grow the whole market.
> They’ve been doing around 30 per year
(N+1 means N dedicated launches, plus 1 Starlink rideshare.)
This is pure invention. They've done 24+1 this year, putting them on pace for 33+1 to 34+2 — the schedule is for 46+1, but there are always customer delays. They did 27+2 last year. Then 14+2 before that, then 12+1, then 11. There was a small one-time launch glut in 2016-2017, when they were emptying the built-up commercial backlog other providers had underserved, but that's 18 and 21 launches, still much lower than their current run rate, and you can hardly blame satellite providers for taking a few years to adapt to build their new satellites.
We saw the same thing play out with Falcon Heavy, for example. After its initial flights, it was left without a lot to do. Only very recently have the satellites built for its capabilities shown up, and in the last 12 months it has flown 4 times, with yet two more planned for this year alone.
On the Falcon Heavy point, we're also seeing new valuable launch niches, with not just Heavy flying regularly, but an increase in commercial crewed launch too. Transporter flights are not especially expensive but they're clearly a valuable market that could not exist without SpaceX.
> And one of deals may push it higher, like Amazon, but so far they didn’t show ability to sustainably grow the whole market.
The pretense that an 89 launch deal for a long-lived constellation isn't growing the market is nonsense. That's like 10 years of flights at ULA's heyday, from one customer's initial launch deal alone.
Maybe you think it isn't going to happen - and sure there is some risk (!) - but in the successful case, SpaceX should be worth many trillions. At least.
If some follow-on vehicle were ever developed adequate to support a martian colony, and lunar gravity were to turn out to suffice, getting any actual value return from such a vehicle is hard to imagine. You might try to use it to support automated mining of platinum-group metals from asteroids, but it is far from clear how that could be made to work out. That it seems possible in principle is usually not considered a sound basis for investment.
Musk certainly understands all of the above. He will cash out long before it is demonstrated to all be a pipe dream.
How could any rocket that can deliver several tons be inadequate for that?
Pressure suits for everybody on board might be crammed in, but more likely just two or three to use collecting more from cargo ships already landed.
For that to make any sense at all, somebody would need to figure out a profitable economy for a Mars colony. Nobody has been able to do that.
Big defense contracts from the US military is where SpaceX will strike gold, if they do. All the money is in launching stuff into Earth orbit to serve some practical purpose on Earth.
I'll say they will cap at 8-10B revenue (+inflation).
But this year, SpaceX will
If the only launch vehicle was the SLS, the market size would be $0. That's not meaningful!
The market size is limited, because, well, why would you send stuff up there? GPS, telco, science (iss). I guess if you make it cheap enough, high class hostels? (doubt it, and you have to have human rated spacecraft).
Until space mining is a thing, and in that case you should rather invest in mining companies, the market size is limited.
The issue here is the market doesn't know where we are on the S curve. If we've looking at space shuttle prices, we are at the end of the curve. If SpaceX pulls off reusability with the starship, then I'm going to make guesses we are much lower on the curve then most expect.
If they can get 'cheap' launches of 100-200T to orbit then a massive number of new possibilities open up and SpaceX won't sit around as just a cheap transport monopoly, they expand horizontally into other space based markets.
In my opinion, the more interesting part is the valuation in light of no tangible exit strategy.
I wonder what time frame investors are looking at in order to realize their gains.