alt Hacker NewsI'm a SpaceX investor, and from reading the comments here, I think most people here are missing why SpaceX has an outrageously high valuation.
SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if you buy into their mission of creating a civilization on Mars, and that the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation is the vehicle that creates this future. If SpaceX achieves this, it would be the most valuable company ever created. It would be worth $10s of trillions.
I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions. So I find the current $1.75 trillion valuation very logical, if not a little underpriced.
If you believe there's a SpaceX won't achieve these ambitions, which I'd assume most people in this thread belong to, then you'd assign a <1% chance of this happening. Then you'd value the company based on it's financials, at a more realistic $200B. You'd explain the 8x valuation gap though a mixture of financial engineering and Elon grifting, both of which I agree are happening.
The current $1.75 trillion valuation comes from the ratio of people in camp A to camp B.
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> SpaceX's valuation only makes sense if
It’s funny, I hear the exact same phrasing used when justifying Tesla’s valuation. “It only makes sense if…” … if you ignore what the actual, physical business does today, and picture it doing something entirely different, beyond its current capabilities (robotaxis, androids, etc)
The difference with this pie-in-the-sky ambition (Mars Colony) is that I don’t even understand how it would be profitable if achieved. What do you get from a Mars colony? What on earth (no pun intended) could you extract from it that would command that amount of value? This isn’t like colonization of the americas, where there was a trove of readily available natural resources to extract and sell back to the mainland markets - nothing is going to get shipped back from Mars any time soon. A Mars colony could only be supported through significant public investment - so is the valuation justified via the expectation that SpaceX will be the primary vehicle for public investment in Mars exploration, or through the centuries-long payback period of founding a self-sustaining civilization? Or both?
"I personally believe SpaceX has a 70% chance of achieving its Mars ambitions."
When will that be? There are so many unsolved problems with Mars that creating a civilization on Mars will probably be decades or centuries away. Creating an autonomous station on Antarctica or the moon is child's play compared to Mars. And we are far away from that too.
"If everything goes perfectly according to plan over the next 30 years and they don't literally kill anyone through an accident it has huge value."
I wish I had the guts to just lie to investors with a bald face. I personally think Musk is an underachiver.
is there an article or document covering the value proposition and realistic timeline of Mars colonization available to read somewhere ? i certainly think it's good for humanity to do it but as a casual observer i imagine it will cost a lot of money over the next ~20 years as opposed to making any.
A civilization on Mars would not create value. It would be a money incinerator. Mars is a shithole with nothing to offer humanity economically or in quality of life. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Good to know. So if you're in the majority and figured out Musk is full of shit, don't invest.
I believe there's a 0% chance SpaceX will achieve any of this, at least in my lifetime.
I however also believe that enough people will be lining up to buy whatever fantasy Musk sells (look at the Tesla stock as a shining example).
So I think SpaceX is still going to be a great investment if you can manage to get it at or below IPO price.