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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> Price is not a good metric here you can subsidize your pricing to hell if you have budget.

1. As far as I know, no one has presented any evidence that SpaceX sells Falcon 9/H launches for less than cost. ArianeSpace used to really talk up this point, but even they've mostly given up.

2. I'm not really sure why it matters. If SpaceX can sell for less than cost at their current volume, well... good for the tax payers - we're getting a deal.

> Elon loves to do this btw.

Really? I thought Tesla was known for it's high margins? I don't think any of Elon's other businesses are public.

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> If SpaceX can sell for less than cost at their current volume, well... good for the tax payers - we're getting a deal.

At the cost of killing all other competitors and letting SpaceX monopolize so we are stuck with whatever quotes from SpaceX?

> At the cost of killing all other competitors and letting SpaceX monopolize so we are stuck with whatever quotes from SpaceX?

1. Are you suggesting that SpaceX will bankrupt Japan (HIII), India (GSLV/PSLV), and Europe (Ariane 6)? That seems unlikely to me.

2. There's very little evidence that SpaceX will jack up prices when they're a monopoly. I mean, they're a defacto monopoly right now (in a limited sense) with ULA transitioning to Vulcan, and ArianeGroup transitioning to Ariane 6. And their prices haven't budged.

3. The DoD (as part of NSSL) and NASA work very hard to split large contracts between multiple launch providers - effectively ensuring that there is no monopoly in US medium-heavy launch providers.

Nonsense. Complete and uther nonsesens. Anybody who spends even 5 min realizes this is wrong. ULA isnt going away, no-matter how cheap SpaceX is. Arianespace wont go away. China, Russia, India and Japan wont go away. BlueOrigin wont go away.

If anything SpaceX has lead to an explosive increase in competition.

You're correct, we don't have evidence that SpaceX is pricing below cost, because we have no idea what Falcon 9 launches actually cost, because SpaceX refuses to tell us.

And every expert who has analyised it or thought about it know its nonsense. SpaceX has told us, but you simple believe them.

SpaceX has shown these numbers to investors and have received money on good valuation. If not even there core buissness was profitable why would anybody invest in Starship?

The argument that SpaceX subsudizes their launch prices is just a nonsense argument that doesnt hold up to study.

We know that SpaceX told us that the incremental cost for a Falcon 9 launch is around $28M. So clearly they're not priced below cost.

> If SpaceX can sell for less than cost (...)

This can and is considered predatory pricing, which is a criminal offense in some jurisdictions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

What margins are you talking about? You think selling model 3 is a high margin business.

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