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darth_avocadolast Friday at 8:46 PM1 replyview on HN

> Circular financing

Keep in mind, Google has a 6% stake in SpaceX, so this is more like exchanging millions to gain billions.


Replies

harmmonicalast Friday at 9:10 PM

Yeah, I just looked this up because my first thought was another circular financing deal (or not circular by definition but certainly backscratching). Looks like Google's SpaceX stake, diluted, based on a cursory search, at a $1.5T valuation is somewhere in the $80-$100B neighborhood (bought back in 2015 I think is what it said when SpaceX was valued in the low tens of billions if I'm remembering correctly). So you have Google sending $12B back to SpaceX annually in this deal, so maybe 12% or so of their equity stake at that valuation. I'm not sure how to feel about it other than a means of swaying people to buy into the IPO with the added benefit of actual compute value.

And seems silly to ignore that the Google founders and Elon are buddies, or were, based on which gossip rag you believe in, and there's zero chance these types of deals are being made independent of those guys talking (when are they ever, of course, but it's even more obvious in this case given the players and their histories).