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Comment by jtriangle | Hacker News Reader

Somebody does, but it's a private company, so, private books, so the general public doesn't know.

You can do some napkin math and guess that their flights for NASA are profitable, along with all the other commercial work they do. We don't know if SpaceX as a whole is profitable, but, I'd assume it's not given how heavily they're into R&D at this point. What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development if their cost per kg is actually realized.

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Right, so the point was all this handwaviness about how bloated Boeing's costs are in this space are just wild guesses at what SpaceX's might be.

For all anyone actually knows, Elon is willing to lose a ton per launch just to gain mindshare, kill the competition, and become the only game in town. You know, the Amazon playbook.

For all anyone knows, the Boeing quotes are reasonable and SpaceX's are unsustainable. Nobody actually knows... yet so many are willing to confidently assert SpaceX is obviously cheaper.

> What is reasonably certain is that they likely will be profitable once they're not spending crazy amounts of money on development

This is a space race. The day when SpaceX no longer needs to spend "crazy amounts of money on development" may never actually come.

What we do know is that SpaceX was able to deliver the requirements 4 years (and counting) earlier than Boeing. And they continue to deliver. Yeah, they could be losing money hand over fist, but at the very least they delivered.

We have two facts to contradict this.

1. Being a viable sustainable business is a requirement for some of SpaceX's NASA and the Space Force's contracts. NASA & the Space Force have access to SpaceX's books and SpaceX has passed these audits.

2. SpaceX has very obviously been spending many billions to build Starlink and Starship and to pay >14,000 employess. SpaceX has not raised significant money for over 18 months, nor have previous raises been enough to cover their fairly obvious expenditures. That money is coming from somewhere, and process of elimination says "profits".

I only know second hand what's happening at boeing, specifically, I know someone who was in charge of their IT infra there, at one of the parts manufacturing facilities. They frequently were given a project to spec out and then implement, and the management never asked how much anything would cost and early in their time there, when it was brought up, it was handwaved off as not important. Their direct management later told them that they don't have a budget for -anything- and to not worry about it.

Now, that may just have been the case for IT infra, but, their impression was that at very least their facility had a blank check and costs didn't really matter.

Ironically, they left after getting a promotion while stiffing them on a raise. That, understandably, didn't sit well with them in the light of the rest of the situation.

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