SpaceX Sells 10% Stake to Google, Fidelity for $1B
bloomberg.com
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I don't know. I'm getting more and more the impression that Page is cut from the same cloth like Elon Musk. Both seem to be balls-to-the-walls visionaries who accept nothing less than the utmost limits of what's possible - and then aim a bit higher than that.
I'm starting to think that, for Page, "evil" means "anything less than the greatest possible good for the largest number of people, over a very long term".
They had terrible privacy settings on Google Buzz, letting anyone you had any email conversations find out where you've checked in to.
They're the only mobile OS maker who will not put a proper update system in place, leaving millions of their users without patches. Google is unapologetic about this, even going as far to say 4.4.4 is out of support and users should upgrade to 5, even though most Android handsets are incapable of upgrading. Serious security flaws exist in older versions, and the systems will never be patched.
Let's talk about the anti-poaching agreement they had, hurting not only their staff, but all of IT in general.
Google is the only huge company I know of that still believes it is a startup that can get away with anything, including breaking the law. I have nothing against the people at Google, they do amazing things. But the company needs to learn the value of corporate responsibility sooner rather than later.
That isn't going to make people irritated with them recording unencrypted data any happier, but I guess it is reasonable to be accurate and specific.
It's a law of nature.
Sure, Page has accomplished quite a bit, but I find it hard to compare to Elon Musk's track record in founding multiple cutting-edge firms in several wildly different domains. Perhaps I assign too much to the production of physical goods and not enough to software but that is a bias I must admit.
By which I mean that I hope that SpaceX's mission to lift the human race out of Earth's gravity well, colonise Mars and explore the galaxy doesn't end up playing second fiddle to some elaborate ploy designed to sell more online adverts.
Why not:
More ads -> more $$ -> more information -> more organization -> more people online (and, thus, more freedom, more intelligence, etc.)
By the same token, you're a machine that transforms food and oxygen into excrement and CO2. That puts it harshly, but it's entirely what this is about - if you judge things at that level.
What I mean is - selling ads is what keeps their "corporate metabolism" going, but the actual long-term goals of the founders might be (and, indeed, are) very different from that most basic of all levels.
There seems to be plenty of evidence that Google's top leadership is more focused on finding alternate revenue streams that just "selling ads".
The hardest thing I ever did as an investor was let go of thinking there's some correlation between the things I like and market value.
What investors are looking at is potential. The upside for heavy-industry SpaceX is far more constrained than that of a social media company.
I'd argue that the upside of making launches happen at 1/10 the traditional cost, with the potential for easy reusability with minimal refurbishment (which will allow much more than 2x launch volume, and a much greater cost reduction) is larger than WhatsApp's to a hilarious degree.
More difficult as a business, maybe, and then only because it's a crowded market.
In terms of technology, messaging apps are hilariously less difficult than rockets.
What % of AT&T's market cap ($175B) is its SMS business? What % of Lockheed Martin's market cap ($65B) is its space business? Think about the incumbents WhatsApp & SpaceX are trying to dislodge. Generally speaking the ones WhatsApp (now Facebook) are larger by market cap than the ones SpaceX is targeting. That reflects the fact that something everyone uses a little bit every day is generally worth more than something used by very few people, intensely.
To be pedantic, more like hundreds of millions of people monthly.
*This is equivalent to: There are tons of people who think space is cool or useful and do nothing because it's too expensive and that won't be true with SpaceX's costs in 10 years.
I seem to remember Elon saying this himself in a relatively recent announcement. I believe it was the one where they unveiled the human pod thingy to go ontop of the falcon, but could be wrong. Either way, they use modern design and manufacturing methods, where the competitors like ULA use methods developed in the 70s and refined slightly in the 80s.
The capital equipment probably is largely pretty specialized to not only the market they are in but their approach to it, and may not be that marketable on its own.
And, despite the name "human resources", regular employees aren't property, and their attachment to SpaceX may be fairly tenuous, particularly in the event of a change in management and operational style.
Even if each one of them was paying the $1 annual fee, that's still less than a billion dollars in revenue.
Also, often valuations are based on the number of employees. SpaceX has 3,000 plus billions of dollars in capital equipment. Whatsapp had 55 I believe and basically zero dollars in capital equipment.
I think that there is more to this deal than "Google gets 10% for $1 billion". There is no way SpaceX is only worth $10 billion.
Further, that's of little relevance to a minority investor like Google, as they can't turn around and say "let's sell to Lockheed now", and staff moves.
In terms of capital equipment, you have to consider how quickly that equipment depreciates and who might be interested in it. Is there even a market for X billion in whatever equipment SpaceX owns? The purchase price is irrelevant.
For many people, their Gmail id is their sole or primary id on the internet, used to identify them to scores of websites. It is their official online point of contact for various aspects of their online lives including their career, banking, social networking etc.
Facebook is their online social profile, which they spent thousands of hours curating.
Your Whatsapp id is merely your Phone no., (which was Whatsapp's main selling point). All interactions in Whatsapp are ephemeral in nature - Most people delete their conversations when their phone memory gets full. Compared to gmail and facebook, the switching costs are practically zero.
Yup. Toilet paper is a massive industry, too, worth a lot of money.
No snark, just reality.
This isnt a bad idea actually - "if you want access to WhatsApp-X, then you must use Space-X inet service"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915524
EDIT: but to answer your question - yes, I very much feel like that.
If whatsapp start charging or introduce ads I can't see why people would stick around, considering the Huge number of whatsapp users who also have viber/snapchat/basis sms also installed
Nothing at all...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Inte...
ISS scientific value coverage in media sucks, I'll grant you that.
"The Portable Glovebox (PGB) was developed for the European Space Agency for use on the International Space Station (ISS); it can be transported around ISS and used in any laboratory module. The PGB confines accidental spillage of materials and helps prevent contamination of biological materials when the experiment containers are opened for observations, sampling, and fixations."
Yes. Figuring out design and use of lab equipment for microgravity conditions, as well as actually using it in further experiments, is definitely not beneficial for anything.
BTW. one of the important research done in orbit I recently learned about is figuring out how plants sense gravity. There were some cool results wrt. that, and this is the kind of research that is both important and hard to do on the surface.
Also, you seem to be confused as to the purpose of the glovebox. While there may be an experiment to test it, it is not an experiment, it is apparatus for experiments.
It's possible they'll never figure out launcher re-use, or get it working well enough to matter. It's possible they will and no one will care that space launch is now 10% what it was, and flight rates will stay the same, and they'll just end up dominating a relatively small and stable niche. It's possible the incumbents will quickly copy their techniques and push them aside. It's possible they'll fail in enough launches to drive off every customer and bankrupt the company.
I don't believe any of that, but it's possible and you have to take the uncertainty into consideration of value. Whatsapp has users and works and will continue to work. You know what you're getting there.
I thought they were already profitable? But is that incorrect? It would seem disingenuous to claim that they lowered the price of space travel by 90% if they actually weren't even breaking even? hahahha.
Yes I believe we are living in Bizarro-world.
Oh it says here that my dream to solve world hunger is worth north of a gazillion dollars.
Whatsapp got bought by Facebook, they will definitely not become the next Facebook and I sincerely doubt they'll ever become the next google. Try as I might, living without Google is hard, living without Facebook is stupidly easy.
Essentially, the value of WhatsApp is based more on what it could have destroyed than on what it could have created. Advertising is kind of funny like that, since it's not a product that consumers actually want. No value is lost to consumers by switching to a platform without advertising, even though the economic damage to advertisers can be huge.
SpaceX still has it's independence and fresh infusion of $1billion in cash. It would probably fetch much more than $10 billion if it sold out now, but I doubt Musk would want to do that.
Free(but very slow) ad supported internet every where on earth.
Connection to the cloud for a million different kind of Internet-Of-Things class devices. I think this is pretty big as these devices consume very little data, but generally have issues getting connectively at all in some the more remote areas these things tend to get deployed. Think ocean current mappers, artic ice melting detectors, or a multitude of geo-sensors that would love to have a connection in extremely remote areas.
Satellite-based emergency beacon in every phone?
Slow but usable internet for remote villages. Pushing news, weather, education materials. Perhaps combined with solar power One Laptop Per Child class devices.
IoT companies can create through own hardware and pay bulk rates.
Cellphone companies certainly have the option to get on the boat too, if the hardware necessary to communicate to satellites is small enough to go in a smart phone, as have the option to make an emergency call(or most likely SMS/Email) nearly anywhere in the world is a pretty killer feature.
That is why I was careful to specify traditional satellite internet services. It appears the distinction was lost.
22,236 miles up, opposed to LEO which starts at about 100 miles up.
The highest cost is that you will lose sync with the satellite, since they will be rotating over the horizon frequently. If you can launch enough satellites, then you can have multiple in view at any given time and thus keep a continuous link.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
altitude: 160 to 2,000 kilometers (99 to 1,200 miles)
orbital period: ~88 to ~127 minutes
latency: 20 to 40 msecs
Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO)
altitude: 42,164 km (26,199 mi)
orbital period: 1 day (approximately 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds)
latency: 240 milliseconds
I wonder how this will be different (if at all) from GEO satellites when it's cloudy. Could you presumably find a satellite near the horizon to use to bypass the clouds?
I know nothing about these sorts of things, so sorry if that's a stupid question.
A lot of people are comparing this to Whatsapp. But Whatsapp wasn't publicly traded either. All we can say is that Mark Zuckerberg thought Whatsapp was worth at least $20bn to him and 10% of Spacex is worth at least $1bn to Google. How much they might be worth to other people is unknown.
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has raised a billion dollars in a
financing round with two new investors, Google and Fidelity.
They join existing investors Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson,
Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn. Google and Fidelity will collectively
own just under 10% of the company.
SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced
rockets and spacecraft. This funding will be used to support continued
innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite
manufacturing.
Think about it this way, if they truly are the first company to start laying claim to mineral deposits (or provide service to whatever govt does lay claim) on asteroids, satellites like the Moon, and other planets the amount of value in this company - even over the upcoming centuries - is going to be greater than the East India Company, General Electric, or Apple ever where.
Now that's an investment well worth leaving to our kids.
"Having technology able to recover said deposits and deliver them to an area of meaningful economic activity without costing several multiples of the value (or, more realistically, several thousand multiples of the value) of the minerals in question" would certainly justify a very high valuation for SpaceX. But they do not have such technology, and it is far from clear that they are on the path to having that technology anytime soon.
And nothing has much present value today based on its prospective value in centuries. In 100 years, we could be superintelligent nanotech swarms. Or extinct. Or anything in between. Only a fool would place much certainty on the value of a mineral deposit that far out.
Certainly SpaceX has an air of "tool builders" about them -- they'll build the shovels and pick axes of the space economy. As evidenced by their current economic successes, they're banking on the evolution of the industry -- not a quantum leap 100 years hence.
A great (related) scifi novel: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein
If I set up a company tomorrow claiming to have solved cold fusion, I'd argue it was beyond undervalued. Until I deliver on that promise an investment would remain a risk. Not that I wish to demean what SpaceX have done so far - it's fantastic. But rocket science is, well, rocket science. And a lot can go wrong.
Earth orbit is hard in terms of energy costs, but relatively easy in other terms: you don't need to solve the long-term independent life support problem, manufacture things off-planet, or figure out how to do supply lines in space.
Although in this instance, that probe is destined for L1, which is still in Earth orbit. (The Lagrange points are where you are simultaneously in orbit around two bodies - Earth and the sun, here)
That said, on the verge of bankruptcy, Radio Shack currently only has a Market Cap of 25MM.
I couldn't advocate an actual purchase now, but at one point it seemed interesting. I just wasn't thinking big enough.