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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

> That is essentially a wealth transfer to the rich. They don't need it.

These are not valid arguments. The companies that get added to the S&P are always owned in some fraction by rich people.

SpaceX is obviously majorly owned by Elon, but it’s also owned by regular employees, a bunch of private investors and other funds that regular people invest in.

> They're not profitable.

Right

> When they prove they're worth the dollars,

Profitable isn’t related to “worth the dollars”. You need to look at income and how much is being reinvested into growth. Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet.

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> Profitable isn’t related to “worth the dollars”. You need to look at income and how much is being reinvested into growth. Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet.

Amazon met profitability requirements and went into the SP500 at around $2.40 in November 2005. Two years before it was $2.70. Six Years before it was $4.40.

Two years _after_ listing it was $4.50. Six years after it was ~$10.

Waiting for profitability seems like it was a good bet.

Mostly owned by Elon who has 84% of the voting rights. Completely his entity and it can’t be denied that the value of an interesting space business has been massively inflated by tacking a worthless AI business onto it.

Again, voting rights don’t really matter. Google famously split shares to hold control while going to the market.

Twitter too, right?

> "Amazon famously remained unprofitable due to reinvestment and waiting for them to become profitable before investing was a bad bet."

Amazon wasn't profitable because it reinvested earnings into growth, while SpaceX is funding it's growth by taking on very significant levels of debt (which will take a big chunk of future earnings just to service). These aren't comparable from a risk perspective.

> Amazon wasn't profitable because it reinvested earnings into growth

Was this obvious early on?

Yes, every time there was discussion about Amazon not being profitable it was discussed.

TBF, it was obvious for Uber too, but when that one decided to cash on the results of the growth, there wasn't much they could take. So it's not a certain thing by any means.

But anyway, it's also clear SpaceX isn't doing the same as Amazon.

Sure, but we the only thing we know about the company is the current S1 filing. Need to time to see what all of that looks like. Fast tracking it and essentially forcing other people to buy without scrutinizing is the problem. They may very well be worth the money they claim, but we won't know until after they've proven it. That's what the rules are there for.

So is spacex growing like Amazon was? There is no evidence of growth. And no, Google renting them infra grom then is not growth. If it waa, AllBirds is the next unicorn

> There is no evidence of growth

There is plenty of evidence of growth. The problem is SpaceX as it is is a conglomerate recently cobbled together, and so estimating what it is and what it's going to do is challenging.

SpaceX isn't what it once was, but its Starlink division has grown from 50k users to 12 million in 5 just years.

We don't have good public numbers, but that should be over $13B in revenue and about $2B of income over the last 12 months. Given the growth trend of that 5 years, that approx. $2B of income is likely to double by the end of this year.

Add to that the space launch business around Falcon 9, which had 40+ commercial launches that generated about $4B revenue and something close to $3B of income, and SpaceX was looking strong.

Again, SpaceX isn't what it was 6 months ago, before all the xAI fuckery, but the core business, Starlink and space launch, are doing well by themselves.

> SpaceX is obviously majorly owned by Elon, but it’s also owned by regular employees, a bunch of private investors and other funds that regular people invest in.

Is it really owned by them if Elon retains most of the voting rights anyway?

> Is it really owned by them if Elon retains most of the voting rights anyway?

Owned by various folks. Controlled by Elon. Granted, I don't know how Texas law deals with minority rights.

I am not sure if Texas law on the subject is well defined. The SpaceX materials make it clear their position on minority rights is "you have the right to trust Elon or not buy the stock"

Effectively it is solely owned by Elon and other people have an equity stake. This is another huge risk. You have to trust Elon not to get distracted and decide to hard pivot to something else.

Look at Tesla and their hard pivot to humanoid robots. He is all in on robots which about a dozen other companies already make and are largely unprofitable in making. He is betting AI rapidly improves in a way that allows robots to become rapidly more useful and there is zero evidence that is feasible in the next 5 - 10 years.

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