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The spacex IPO has happened and made Elon Musk a Trillionaire.
There are probably hundreds of potential topics from this story, feel free to go off on your own tangents.
What I am interested in is that this is a company that is building real world things, and not fake internet shit. It feels like a lot of new wealth and investment in America comes from and is directed to the internet. I think one of the main reasons has been that large investors are generally play-it-safe followers. They see which companies are newly striking it rich: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple, etc. And they are happy to invest in copy-cats.
I'm hoping the spacex IPO has a similar effect. That investors start chasing new copy cats. But this time copy-cats of spacex rather than copy cats of facebook or google.
Unfortunately, most of SpaceX's valuation is from their investments in datacenters (renting compute to Anthropic and others) rather than in their rocket and satellite internet business. It would have been a no-brainer buy for me if the bulk of their valuation was still coming from rockets and Starlink.
If this is going to inspire copycats, it will sadly inspire a bunch of datacenter REIT copycats as opposed to space and satellite copycats.
Source? Numbers from the prospectus:
@MartianNight
Based on a market cap of 2.5 trillion and 18.7 billion/year revenue, SpaceX has an EV/R of around 135. (For reference, an EV/R of 3.57 is typical for aerospace companies according to the first source I could find.)
Clearly the valuation is almost entirely speculative rather than based on current fundamentals. Of the three segments, it seems like the AI branch has the highest growth potential.
Here's another random article: Top analyst: 71% of SpaceX’s $2 trillion value rests on AI.. Of course, that's also just an (expert) opinion, but the fundamental argument seems sound.
Why would you pay >100x revenue for the space company when they already cornered half the market? Starlink already has over 10 million users; how much bigger can that number realistically get when most people will only use satellite internet as a last resort, when fixed and mobile networks aren't available? The only part that doesn't have an obvious ceiling like that is xAI.
I think you aren’t being imaginative enough re Starlink.
First you have airlines, remote worksites, cruises, and other uses. Those prices can increase over time once customers get used to and thus demand the good.
You have areas without broadbrand. In the U.S., this is rural areas. But worldwide, it is a lot larger. Sure this market may not be the most lucrative but with a large enough vol becoming the ISP for the entire third world could be valuable.
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