SpaceX raises $1.9B

https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/18/spacex-raises-1-9-billion-in-largest-funding-found-to-date/

by tosh • 6 years ago

87 79 6 years ago

firebaze• 6 years ago

If there's one billionaire on the world I'd have no second thoughts about it's Elon Musk. I know I'll probably regret having said that in 20-30 years :)

Honestly, if there's one person on this planet which is furthering human future it's Elon Musk and his vision to have human habitats on other planets.

Facing climate change, wars, overpopulation etc.pp, if we had at least one other place other than earth - as hostile as it may be - and we start to sustain life there, all life on earth would suddenly be only one bet out of two (or more).

martythemaniak• 6 years ago

Yeah, it seems to me like the classic artist-vs-the-art debate. Let's be honest, the guy IS rather brilliant in multiple fields and he's built large, effective organizations whose output is head and shoulders above everyone else. He's can also be an obnoxious ass with a juvenile sense of humour. If he were to turn out to be <insert vile thing here> tomorrow, the rockets will still land the Model3s will still be safer and more efficient than their competition.

FWIW, I fall on the "art" side of this debate. I didn't think highly of Jobs, but I still got the OG iPhone, MBPs, etc. I often wish Musk would STFU, but I still love driving my Model 3 and I'm saving up to buy a ticket on Starship.

travisoneill1• 6 years ago

"brilliant in multiple fields and he's built large, effective organizations" vs. "obnoxious ass with a juvenile sense of humour"

I'm shocked at how often I see people put these on an equal level. We forgave our last rocket guy for being a literal nazi.

chrisjarvis2• 6 years ago

Why can't Elon Musk be as uncharismatic and uninteresting as Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes I don't like his tweets! :__(

heimatau• 6 years ago

You had me until 'facing...overpopulation'. To boot, Elon Musk has talked about this [1].

We are not facing overpopulation. Population is contracting currently and will continue for at least a few decades.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s_4VnXHF64

vidarh2• 6 years ago

Worldwide population is still projected to grow for many decades.

Birthrates are dropping.

snarf212• 6 years ago

Respectfully, I'd argue we are already overpopulated. The contraction will take a while to really take hold. Eventually we will no longer be overpopulated. I just don't think the Earth can sustainably support more than 2 billion people. But it will take quite a long time for us to fall that far and it will come with other issues. Additionally, it will take far longer for the oceans and atmosphere to recover but it eventually will.

I also don't understand how we think we'd do better on Mars than on Earth. We have near infinite resources and advantages here and we trashed it. We have none of those on Mars.

willvarfar• 6 years ago

“Over”-population depends upon your definition and judgement on the planets ability to sustain us etc.

But population declining? Nope! Here’s a great and accessible explanation:

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_gro...

dougmwne3• 6 years ago

The growth rate is slowing, but population will continue to expand till we add several more billion people. With our current population, there are many resources we are using unsustainably: soil, fresh water, seafood, raw materials, fuel, and carbon sinks. Any one of these things could cause extreme disruptions if a country or region's access is cut off or reduced. I think it's common to think of these kinds of warnings as alarmist. Compare this with the denialism and impact of COVID. At first it seems remote and impossible, as if life will certainly continue on like it always has, then suddenly every school in the world closes down and all borders are shut. If a bit of RNA can change the world so, imagine extreme regional food shortages.

graham_paul3• 6 years ago

we start to sustain life there

Then you just have WW4 and we all die. Wars have been started for far worthless things (when you compare it to the game changing thing that would be to have a place in Mars), something like Mars would cause a lot of deaths way before humans get there and it would probably remove any motivation to actually fix human-caused problems in Earth because hey, thanks to Musk we can just leave to Mars. All those rich people that are now building bunkers could collectively purchase Mars (whatever that means) and leave Earth when it is beyond repair (right after squashing every resource out of it). I don't think humanity is anywhere ready for it even if the technology was ready right now. Our social systems are fragile and tend to centralization and authoritarian forms of governance

headsupernova• 6 years ago

Life on Mars will always suck hopelessly compared to life on Earth. It's a terrible cold desert where you can't breath.

simonh• 6 years ago

Rich people building bunkers sounds like a conspiracy theory.

No billionaires are going to go to Mars for the lifestyle. Country estates, super yachts, fur coats and Rolexes on one side, and a plastic bubble habitat and nylon jumpsuit in a freezing airless desert on the other. How many of the elite are really going to go for the second? It just seems like fantastical thinking.

cma• 6 years ago

For someone running a backup colony on another planet I wouldn't choose someone with as bad a pandemic policy as Musk.

meddlepal• 6 years ago

SpaceX feels like the next "big thing"... question is when does it IPO. Even if the Mars stuff never pans out they can be a very successful business in telecommunication infra.

_lbaq• 6 years ago

I hope it never IPO's, it is too important to be public for now. Worst case scenario is that it IPO and McKinsey comes in to "streamline" the company ...

andys627• 6 years ago

Surely Musk would retain control of the board like he has with Tesla

gaogao• 6 years ago

Streamline the rockets, not the company.

cotillion• 6 years ago

I think its unlikely SpaceX will have an IPO. Elon likely wants to maintain as much control as possible until he gets to Mars. Spinning of Starlink makes sense once its up and running.

doikor• 6 years ago

Elon has said multiple times that he won't go public before Mars stuff has happened.

Gwynne Shotwell has said they could spinoff Starlink as its own company and IPO it and use that money to fund more Mars projects if they run out of money. But if Starlink is profitable once it is up and running why would they sell it off/IPO? Just keep taking the money over years probably will work better in the long term.

dragon_greens• 6 years ago

Starship and other Mars projects will be large upfront capital expenses with a lot going in R&D.

I believe Musk would prefer faster returns to speed that up than wait a few years more patiently.

KoftaBob• 6 years ago

Musk has mentioned a few months back that they're planning to have Starlink IPO as a separate subsidiary of SpaceX, or something to that effect.

wtsnz• 6 years ago

Where do I wire the money?

purpleidea• 6 years ago

Honest question, why do they need so much money? If their rockets are really re-usable, and with all these launches they've been doing, they should have tons of cash...

kitsunesoba• 6 years ago

Their profits are all being sunk directly into Starlink and R&D for Raptor, Starship, and Superheavy. It's not that reusability isn't netting them a profit, it's that their ambitions outstrip their savings from reuse.

Something to consider is that one of their goals is to be able to operate with relatively little constraint even in the event that government contracts, NASA grants, and/or commercial contracts hit a dry spell. That's the whole point of Starlink, for example — a continuous, launch-independent source of revenue to fund Mars ambitions.

obmelvin• 6 years ago

I certainly think that's a fair question - as you see the contracts they have been awarded and wonder how do they not have adequate cash flow for that given their rocket tech.

The article makes me think:

1) mostly looking for money to build the Starlink satellite network as that is not brining in the necessary cashflow yet

2) it explicitly mentions the round was larger than originally intended and oversubscribed. Sure, if you haven't yet proven yourself it's certainly not always great to raise extra, but I don't think that applies as much here

vidarh2• 6 years ago

Because believe they will get a good return from accelerating their development instead of moving at whatever speed the return from their current launches can sustain.

btilly2• 6 years ago

They are generating lots of money with current launches, but are designing a next generation rocket. Rocket programs are expensive.

The best comparison for the rocket that Musk is building for Mars is to SLS. Per https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/nasas-sls-moon-rocket-is-2... we've spent over $17 billion on the SLS program so far, and it probably isn't as far along as Musk's SuperHeavy/Starship is.

Admittedly Musk is doing his rocket development for cheaper. A lot cheaper. But the baseline for what rocket development "should" cost is more than SpaceX has received in revenue, total, through all of its history. (Not profit, revenue. Nobody knows what its profit margin is. But given that SpaceX routinely launches at prices below what its competitors can afford, they probably aren't rich.)

black6• 6 years ago

we've spent over $17 billion on the SLS program so far, and it probably isn't as far along as Musk's SuperHeavy/Starship is.

There is a nearly complete SLS core stage awaiting testing at Stennis Space Center. How far along is Starship?

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/08/sls-green-run-verify...

avernon• 6 years ago

A lot of their recent launches have been for their internet constellation, StarLink. Given the nature of this constellation, they have to do a large number of launches before it is operational and can take paying customers. There is a large upfront cost.

Its a bit of a chicken and the egg scenario with launch services right now. The fact that these new internet constellations were coming killed demand for the large, expensive one-off communications satellites that was a large part of SpaceX's business. Fundraising like this gets them across the chasm.

tankenmate• 6 years ago

Obviously it's only part of the cost, and then there's the development costs for Spaceship. SpaceX could probably self fund Spaceship and Starlink, but with investment it will go much quicker. In the case of Starlink there is a limit in that they have to complete at least half their deployment before their timer runs out with the FAA / ITU Radio Regs. So cash flow is an issue aside from reuse.

kaiju0• 6 years ago

They are launching satellites on their own dime. Needs lots of initial capitol.

bob33212• 6 years ago

Did you watch the launch today? The live feed from space was not an iPhone taped to the side of the rocket with FaceTime running. Everything has to be custom built. And it has to be very reliable and durable in a wide range of environments.

ericd• 6 years ago

They want to launch >10k satellites for Starlink. If each satellite costs $1M (I'm making that up), that's $10B right there. I've seen numbers as high as 40k satellites, though I don't know if those are reflective of their near-term goals.

bryanlarsen3• 6 years ago

Both Starlink and Starship were estimated to cost about $10B each.

Starlink: 12000 satellites * (250K to build + 250K to launch) plus a few hundred base stations, plus a few million terminals, plus...

Elon initially said that Starship woul cost $10B to develop, but that was for the carbon fiber version. Switching to stainless reduced that cost dramatically, but it's still a multi-billion dollar program.

As for rocket launches, they'll probably do about a dozen customer launches this year (plus a similar number of Starlink launches, but those don't provide revenue). The customer launches are sold for about $50M, so call it $25M of profit per to be generous. That's $300M of profit. That doesn't pay for multi-billion programs.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

I wish I, just a guy, could invest in companies like this with no vote stake. I believe in the company and the leadership and I'd like a stake in it and to provide money but I know that if I have the ability to put money in so will all the guys who want an opinion.

It reminds me of Kickstarter. I really enjoyed it because I spend $100 now and then for someone to take a shot at building something. If they fail, so be it. If I get scammed, so be it. I explicitly don't want refunds so that the guys can take a risk. But then other people get involved and they have these high expectations and it ruins everything because then I can't get to the guys who are doing risky things. The way I do it is I fire the money into the ether and then months maybe years later I get an email saying "Sorry, we couldn't do it" or "Where do you want us to ship to?"

i.e. I want an escape hatch for investing and for consumer purchases as well. If the government would let me take a cheap online exam that allows me to exempt myself, I'd love that.

wcoenen• 6 years ago

Are you looking for crowdsourced equity like https://wefunder.com ? You will only find small startups though.

war1025• 6 years ago

I wish I, just a guy, could invest in companies like this with no vote stake.

How is this different from just buying stock?

Or are you referring to companies specifically that aren't public?

bpodgursky3• 6 years ago

It's not public, and no companies issue non-voting shares. It's not even clear they would be allowed by the SEC.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

Yeah, no, it's not. There's just a regulatory barrier that makes it hard for most organizations to release stock like this to the public. I want to lower that barrier for myself because I am willing to accept a higher scam rate.

emiliobumachar• 6 years ago

Well, there's stock when they IPO.

Beyond that, you may be thinking about becoming an accredited investor, but yeah, there are wealth requirements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor

marvin• 6 years ago

Almost none of the companies that IPO in the US today have even the remote possibility of yielding a 20X return, never mind 100X or more. At that stage, you'd usually rather want to go with an index fund.

Most of the allure of early- to mid-stage investments is that a small investment has a small chance of turning into a meaningful stake in a very influential company. So I don't think that the promise of buying a stake in a company that has most of its growth behind it would be very interesting to OP, unfortunately.

darkwizard42• 6 years ago

There are a few ways to get involved in private rounds like this...

1/ Someone is allocated a certain amount and they farm it out to their "fund" of friends and family who invest through an LLC or some other method (I have a modest investment in a few bigger companies this way) 2/ You become an accredited investor yourself, which doesn't require a ton of work but does require some proof that you have capital and then network your way into the raise. (https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-b...)

I think generally speaking there has to be SOME protections in place or investors who want to get a small piece don't get swindled. This is why public companies have so much compliance, disclosure requirements, etc. associated with them so that the government can step in if they are breaking the law or deceiving investors. Likewise with the increased scrutiny on the company, anyone can open a brokerage account and own stock.

I assume you know some of these things and I also share the pain of "how do I just get in with a small stake on some of these big or small private companies"

schoolornot• 6 years ago

Same here, but here's the deal. A lot of these companies are looking for direction, are looking for leadership. Every unicorn I've worked for already had enough financiers behind the scenes. Sure, many of them risked impossible amounts like 10 million to seed the business. Who are you? What do you have to offer?

They get a bad rap but I hold an opposite view. I'd like to know what companies I can hold an activist position in. Surely, there are businesses around town that would take a 200k check for x-percentage.

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

I can accept it if they don't want me. I can also accept me not wanting them. What I don't like so much is that we want each other but the government makes regulation too painful for us to cross the barrier.

ptmcc• 6 years ago

As an accredited investor you can potentially get in on private fundraising rounds.

But most private equity would rather work with a few high value investors instead of many small value investors. It's just so much simpler.

Opening the flood gates to any old Joe Schmoe would run afoul of many SEC rules -- and for good reason. Private equity is enormously more risky and more opaque than public market investing, and could so very easily be abused and fraudulent.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092815/how-b...

renewiltord4• 6 years ago

I am an accredited investor. It's the SEC rules that bother me. There are companies that have taken a lot of investors on but it's usually fairly onerous: https://safegraph.com/blog/safegraph-raises-16-million-serie...

bconnorwhite• 6 years ago

We are far too stupid to not fall for scams. It's better that the government "protects" us. /s

Seriously though, this is messed up. Crypto is similar - CoinMarketCap has a program where you can earn tokens by watching a few videos, but look at the list of restricted countries: "Belarus, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Mainland China, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, United States of America and its territories (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands), Zimbabwe."

Why the f are we on a list with Cuba, Iraq, Iran, China, North Korea, and Syria??? America is not free

purple_ferret• 6 years ago

Elon Musk will be the first trillionaire. Dare I say, the first quadrillionaire.

vidanay3• 6 years ago

And he will quite likely die with less than $100 cash to his name.

the-dude• 6 years ago

Please explain.

StillBored• 6 years ago

I was just thinking something similar. SpaceX on its current trajectory could quite possibly be the equivilant of the next Dutch East India company when it comes to access to space. Which so far, hasn't been particularly a profitable capability. But starlink, might just be the tip of the potential profits. If they manage to get even a small amount of that business worldwide its going to be a cash printing machine and likely once we have people spending more time in space proper economies will start to develop. And spaceX will be there acting like the local bank/govmt taking a couple percent on everything.

That all of course assumes Elon manages to live for another 3-4 decades, because frankly I don't trust anyone else to have enough vision to put everything on the line for scifi level ideas.

SpaceX raises $1.9B

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