In 2026 one gets the impression that SpaceX is a huge company, among the largest in the world. It’s wild to see that its business volume is smaller than Northrop, smaller than Apple’s peripherals alone, smaller than Avnet (heard of ‘em?).
SpaceX is at $18.7B
This is just incredibly off. A brief look at Yahoo Finance shows revenue has grown from $31.9B in 2022 -> $53.7B in trailing 12mos.
Which honestly surprises me, Uber was called a VC pump and dump scheme for years on HN before their IPO. Maybe that's the better lesson here (dont take financial advice from HN comments)
Uber successfully displaced most of the alternatives, slowly raised rates, and maintained operating margin while their fixed costs didn't have to scale as much. Post Travis they've, financially, nailed it.
It was hemorrhaging in many cities using extremely profitable cities like London and NYC to keep their global competitiveness.
Uber was able to pivot and become financially sound with two moves: - Uber Eats becoming first party delivery to restaurants (it started as a limited selection of items from some restaurants and quickly evolved into a Doordash-esque competitor) - Uber launching a 1B+ RR Ads business - margins on this are obviously incredible
Both of those combined with discipline in their ridesharing business (exiting the China market with a sale + stake, dumping their self-driving business when it became a money sink) have led to a recovery in their stock price, but it is FAR from the crazy expectations set up for VCs. I expect those in the last round didn't get a great return, but obviously folk like Benchmark exited like kings.
And profits?
If SpaceX was a space services company (launch, ISP) the numbers involved may be nice; but with all the AI garbage rolled in, it's hemorrhaging money.
As Patrick Boyle points out in this video "SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though" (6m40s):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI
SpaceX has about the same revenue as breakfast cereal maker Kellogg's, but Kellogg's is more profitable.