SpaceX in Talks for Share Sale That Would Boost Valuation to $800B

https://www.wsj.com/business/spacex-in-talks-for-share-sale-that-would-boost-valuation-to-800-billion-b2852191

by bko • 8 months ago

46 127 8 months ago

mikkupikku3• 8 months ago

If SpaceX doesn't get Starship operational soon, they're going to lose their advantage to Blue Origin and probably at least one of the several Chinese rocket companies.

modeless4• 8 months ago

Even without Starship Falcon Heavy is still competitive with New Glenn, and nobody is anywhere close to competing with Starlink (Amazon is still far behind, as is ASTS). And if Starship works SpaceX will still be in the lead for a long, long time.

IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.

MichaelNolan• 8 months ago

I always had the impression that the propellant transfer was the harder question than the heat shield. They have done a transfer demo from one internal tank to another, but they still need to test from one ship to another ship.

I only casually follow the news from r/spacex, but prop transfer is what I see generate the most discussion. It’s a hard requirement for all deep space missions. Where the heat shield could be refurbished between launches.

eitau_1• 8 months ago

New Glenn has an edge over Falcon Heavy and possibly over Starship when it comes to payload volume.

standardUser4• 8 months ago

China is currently building TWO competing starlink-type systems. Given the trajectory of China in recent years, I no longer say "nobody is anywhere close to competing with..." about pretty much anything.

wat100007• 8 months ago

Is that different from, say, a year ago? The Starship concept seems technically sound, and the doubt is about whether SpaceX can actually get there, given the rather slow (visible) pace of progress.

mikkupikku3• 8 months ago

I really want SpaceX to succeed, but the Starship heat shield situation seems quite fucked. I heard they're even reconsidering active cooling now. Maybe they'll figure something out but I don't consider that a foregone conclusion.

htrp• 8 months ago

IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.

Is there a tldr someone put together here ?

firesteelrain• 8 months ago

I don’t see how. SpaceX is still very agile and has the most reliable launch platform

minetest2048• 8 months ago

several Chinese rocket companies

As much as I want to fly with Chinese rocket to encourage launcher competition and redundancy, export controls prevent me from doing that.

zihotki• 8 months ago

That's for you, but that won't stop the rest of the world

bell-cot• 8 months ago

Perhaps. But history suggests that "soon" will still be 6+ years. Scaling up from the first few successful launches of a(n orbital) rocket, to high-frequency / high-reliability / low cost launches of that rocket, appears to be extremely difficult.

garbawarb• 8 months ago

Given Musk's pay package that requires getting Tesla's valuation to $8 trillion, isn't it obvious that he should absorb all of his holdings (SpaceX, X, xAI) into Tesla?

delichon4• 8 months ago

That pay package was a reaction to the large problems he is having competing with ESG forces for control of the company. Keeping SpaceX private is another. He described it as trying to keep the robot army he is building out of enemy hands.

fundad• 8 months ago

What does "ESG forces" add to the discussion other than culture-war flaming?

bfeynman• 8 months ago

Would think that blue origin and project kuiper launching for amazon that would put downward pressure on SpaceX, as they are about to have a huge amount of competition for starlink, as Amazon has massive distribution advantages - wouldn't be surprised introductory bundling with Prime etc...

saubeidl2• 8 months ago

as they are about to have a huge amount of competition for starlink

Don't forget about IRIS2!

panick21_10• 8 months ago

Your joking right? IRIS2 is mostly for government and has nowhere near the capacity or ground infrastructure necessary. Lets alone the advanced laser links to compete for shipping and planes. Let alone the manufacturing of ground terminals.

gsibble2• 8 months ago

What are you joking? Amazon is super far behind and unlikely to be able to launch its satellites in time to meet its FCC licensing requirements. They won't even be only for 24+ months. Meanwhile Starlink is growing very quickly.

Amazon is not a competitor until they actually have a viable product which they may never achieve.

standardUser4• 8 months ago

China will match Starlink in ~5 years and will push adoption hard through it's Belt and Road initiative, just as it has with it's (admittedly superior) GPS system. Starlink may become the de facto option in the Western world, but it won't have a chance at a global monopoly.

danny_codes2• 8 months ago

Starlink is not going to be a monopoly. The other big countries won’t allow it.

Like Tesla, SpaceX was ahead of the game by making big bets on new technology. Over time, that lead erodes when other players start competing. Tesla is now a declining player in EVs rapidly falling behind market leaders in AV and battery tech. I suspect spaceX will have a similar trajectory

spwa45• 8 months ago

Probably a good idea to do it now, because Trump has made sure SpaceX is about to have yet another European, a Chinese and an Indian competitor soon. 2 out of 3 have already demonstrated landing a rocket, as has Blue origin in the US with the New Glenn launch + landing. Plus a few countries are thinking about it, at least Switzerland, South Korea and Israel if you can believe it.

Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on "old" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one.

Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y

TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com "We lose on every sale but make it up on volume" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed.

Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the "ESCAPADE" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically relevant* but worth mentioning. Economics are not what determines either rocket building or launches and hasn't ever done so. Which means rocket launches are cheaper than they can be in private hands.

* what is economically relevant though is that SpaceX is not even saving the US government money. The US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program. Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:

Option 1: pay for SLS

Option 2: pay for SLS and SpaceX.

So really the price of SpaceX rocket launches doesn't even matter, not using SpaceX will be the cheapest option because math.

vardump4• 8 months ago

Plus Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars

What about that Tesla that regularly crosses Mars orbit? Ok, it's not on Mars, but it was just about calculating an orbit. They could have smashed it on Mars as well.

spwa45• 8 months ago

Nice, the wording of "smashed it". Because, the point of getting to Mars or Mars orbit is that you need rocket burns to insert and to land on Mars. Getting to places in space is a delta-V game and paying only half your delta-V costs doesn't count because it doesn't work.

notahacker5• 8 months ago

Injecting a dummy payload into an eccentric helicentric orbit which periodically crosses' Mars' orbit /= a Mars mission. The complexity and relevance to future human presence on Mars isn't close

(Though tbf the choice of launch vehicle isn't that relevant to whether the ESCAPADE mission succeeds, and missions involving Mars flybys like Hera which are lot more serious than the Tesla one have been launched on SpaceX rockets)

dgoodell• 8 months ago

Option 1 isn’t really an option, unfortunately. There are no viable single launch options using it. So it’s really SLS x 2. But building and launching one SLS at a time is almost too much as it is. If that’s the only option, I think Artemis is dead and we should start over.

renewiltord• 8 months ago

Every time someone mentions Eutelsat as a competitor I'm reminded that my own friend group has multiple people who can simply buy the entire company, which sort of describes how successful it is.

Option 1 isn't an option, really. NSSL policy is to ensure that there are two independent providers so that Assured Access To Space can work.

diamond5595• 8 months ago

Yep, he is desperate for cash, he is leveraged to the hilt on his shares which is why he desperately begs his fanboys for more. His empire is a house of cards.

JumpCrisscross10• 8 months ago

Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars

As you said, not especially relevant to a financial discussion.

as for profitability

SpaceX is profitable.

US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program

Being the U.S. government's prime contractor while it keeps ULA on life support is a great deal. Same for Europe and Arianespace.

spwa45• 8 months ago

SpaceX is profitable.

Strange. For me profitable means money_out > money_in, over the whole company history. OpenAI stock is worth 137 billion. Of this, at least 20B was actual money put in (some "free" by the US government). So let's say $18B investment, although that should really be increased by whatever investments were made in Starlink, which is also >$10 billion.

Revenue for SpaceX, with starlink split out (because starlink pays in equity). Obviously, these are guesses.

2024: $14 billion revenue, of which $10b is Starlink investment

2025: $15 billion revenue, of which $11b is Starlink investment

Starlink, when some figures were publicly discussed, in 2023, had $55 million profit on $1.5 billion revenue (but that was counting Starlink shares as cash), about 3.7%

Let's very generously say they doubled that in the past 2 years, and hey, we're being generous, round up. Say they're at 10% margin (Musk's claim, of course, is 60%).

So:

2024: $140 million profit, of which $10b was invested in Starlink

2025: $150 million profit, of which $11b was invested in Starlink

Cashflow:

2024: $-10 billion

2025: $-11 billion

So I think I can be very comfortable in saying that SpaceX is not profitable, it's deep in the red, getting worse over time, only supported by Starlink valuation. With somewhat less confidence I can say it's actually getting less profitable over time, rather than more.

They would need to at least 5x the launches they did in 2024 to just breakeven (while potentially reducing starlink launches to zero, which would make it close to 15x), and they only increased the launches by 20% (138 in 2024 vs 129 launches in 2025 up to october). 20% is generous. There is the question of how much of these launches were Starlink, and for 2025 there is no good data, but up to 2025 Starlink launches increased by over 40%.

My assessment is unless Starlink takes over global internet, SpaceX is bankrupt and will have to sell it's designs and launch technology for pennies on the dollar.

Oh and can I just add, I've interviewed at Starlink and received a (pathetic) offer, which people on reddit claim was pretty typical. Which told me one thing: Starlink is already very aware of the need to drastically save money.

wat100007• 8 months ago

Ridiculous. SpaceX offers a product that costs far less than its competitors while being as good or better in most respects. Their profit margins on launches must be enormous at this point.

That in turn enables Starlink. They can put up thousands of satellites very cheaply. Then they can turn around and sell subscriptions. Starlink has about 8 million active customers. At $40+/month, that's at least $4 billion/year in revenue. Probably a lot more. Given their launch costs, that's a ton of profit.

"not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before" is just... not true. Nothing like it was ever tried before. Iridium is the only one that came even vaguely close, and it was still a radically different type of service. Iridium was extremely low capacity phone service, then low-bandwidth (it made dialup look super fast by comparison) data, with a network of a few dozen satellites covering the globe. It could not support many customers because it had few satellites. It also had to pay for launches in the 1990s, so an order of magnitude or more costlier. That means that it was enormously expensive, for a product few people actually needed. Handsets cost thousands of dollars, then you got to pay several dollars per minute on top of that.

Iridium was basically space dialup, and extremely expensive space dialup at that. Starlink is space broadband, and their cheap launch costs and other technological advancements mean the service is profitable at a competitive price point.

da-x• 8 months ago

TDLR: A link to bad short-seller video from 4 years ago and a lot of unsustainable claims.

panick21_10• 8 months ago

as has Blue origin in the US

Blue Origin is losing many billions every year and has only survived thanks to a hobby project. And even if they continue, to get to SpaceX like cadence is a long way away, and many more billions in investment.

Europe is a decade plus behind and has no way ever to get to the launch cadence. And even then they have 0 chance competing for international launch. And a true Starlink competitor out of Europe is fantasy.

Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor

No it doesn't.

.. not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium

If you really think Starlink and Iridium are comparable, you should get your head checked.

And just because something hasn't worked before, doesn't mean changing technology doesn't change that.

The question you should ask is "Are there historical example where a 10x drop in cost allowed for a new much larger volume in an industry". And if you look at it that way, its patently obvious.

SpaceX doesn't even need to pay itself margin, if SpaceX had to fully buy SpaceX launches, the economics would be a lot worse.

TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com

This is analysis where my only conclusion is that you just hate Musk and SpaceX for political reasons.

Did pets.com make like 10 billion in revenue and had many major militaries as costumers? I must have missed that.

so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program.

It does have a choice the US doesn't need to publicly fund anything. They already have ULA, SpaceX, BlueOrigin, Rocket Lab, Stoke space, Relativity.

Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:

You act as if SLS is the law of the universe, but it isn't. Anybody with a brain has known for 10+ years that eventually the US will switch to commercial rocket launch. As NASA has already mostly done, and DoD has done 100% already.

SLS is the last vestige of a dying system of cronies from the Shuttle days. It has not future. Only a long political fight to suck up as many resources at can be extract from congress before it inevitably dies.

The future in the US is clear, competitive launch with SpaceX as the leading provider and ULA, Blue and friends competing for contracts.

outside1234• 8 months ago

Why not a $40T valuation? Let's really think big here. /s

jjcm• 8 months ago

800b valuation on 13b of revenue in 2024. That's a 61x multiple.

Boeing for comparison has a 2x multiple (65b rev with a 154b valuation).

spongebobstoes• 8 months ago

SpaceX has hints of monopoly, has shown consistent innovation, and has an ambitious long term vision. Boeing lacks all of the above, so it's apples and oranges

FatherOfCurses• 8 months ago

Boeing has an over 100 year history of consistently delivering products at all levels of its industry. SpaceX has .... good vibes?

danny_codes2• 8 months ago

I don’t know about that.

Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.

Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.

Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players

diamond5595• 8 months ago

Fanboy detected. The only thing they are consistent on is blowing up taxpayer bought rockets.

teamonkey• 8 months ago

I think the era where a company’s valuation is defined by its fundamentals is firmly behind us.

JumpCrisscross10• 8 months ago

800b valuation on 13b of revenue in 2024. That's a 61x multiple

From about $9bn in 2023. 40%+ growth yields a PRG ratio (modified PEG [1]) of about 1.5x.

Boeing managed to increase its revenue in 2025 about 10%, putting its similar ratio at around 0.2x. SpaceX trading around 7x where Boeing trades doesn't strike me, at first glance, as unreasonable.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pegratio.asp

panick21_10• 8 months ago

The issue is that its not clear what other markets SpaceX can grow into. The rocket market is small. The government market for sats and the commercial market for sats is bigger but SpaceX already domiantes that.

Its not clear to me how much room there is for that kind of growth to continue.

They are the overwhelmingly dominate space company, but how much actual revenue growth can you get from that. Telecommunications is already the largest part of the sector, and SpaceX already the overwhelmingly dominate player.

At some point you need to break into something other then that to be able to continue to grow.

Or maybe my assumption about that is wrong, and combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative.

cma3• 8 months ago

I think Boeing is up largely for other reasons like entire defense sector going up, especially aerospace, after US aerial participation in the twelve-day Iran war.

donsupreme• 8 months ago

is it really absurd? They have massive moat and virtually have no competitors globally.

antoniuschan99• 8 months ago

Here’s a good infographic on how dominant SpaceX is in the launch market

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1iarntp/orbit...

thinkcontext5• 8 months ago

I wonder if this has more to do with XAi than SpaceX. He recently had SpaceX invest $2B into XAi due to the AI arms race. If SpaceX had unneeded cash sitting around why raise money now?

JumpCrisscross10• 8 months ago

why raise money

"SpaceX is kicking off a secondary share sale." It isn't raising money, it's letting insiders sell. In the past, SpaceX has been a net buyer of its shares in such tenders.

DarmokJalad17013• 8 months ago

This has since then been confirmed to not be true:

    There has been a lot of press claiming @SpaceX is raising money at $800B, which is not accurate. 
    SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors. 

    Valuation increments are a function of progress with Starship and Starlink and securing global direct-to-cell spectrum that greatly increases our addressable market.

    And one other thing that is arguably most significant by far.

    While I have great fondness for @NASA, they will constitute less than 5% of our revenue next year. Commercial Starlink is by far our largest contributor to revenue. 

    Some people have claimed that SpaceX gets “subsidized” by NASA. This is absolutely false. 

    The SpaceX team won the NASA contracts because we offered the best product at the lowest price. BOTH best product AND lowest cost. With regard to astronaut transport, SpaceX is currently the only option that passes NASA safety standards.

Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997399963509150089

straydusk• 8 months ago

Sorry but you linked a source that is bogus be definition

SpaceX in Talks for Share Sale That Would Boost Valuation to $800B

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