SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies (opens in new tab)

These two images are telling:

http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/52/1600x800/landscape-14508878... http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/15/52/1450888612-bevsx.jpg

Maybe not right now, but I wouldn't ever underestimate Bezos.

Musk and Bezos are both people I wouldn't bet against, but they're so drastically different in their styles. Musk is flashy, but gets shit done. Bezos knows how to get shit done quietly... and suddenly he's dominated and bought everything around you.

I'm a big fan of both companies, but having watched them grow I think the answer to whether or not it is true that Blue Origin is a competitor is, "No, yes, maybe?"

If SpaceX can get Falcon Heavy to work then no, so much of the oxygen will be sucked out of the launch services market that Blue Origin will be hard pressed to compete. At that point. I see them much more likely as a ULA acquisition to insure engine supply rather than a continual drain on Jeff Bezo's net worth.

If on the other hand Falcon Heavy continues to slip, or if their early attempts at launching them are unsuccessful, or they are unable to recover the three boosters (which I think is 'baked in' to the market expectations) then Blue seems to be in a position to take some of the heavy launch business, except that there isn't nearly as much of that business as there is the small/medium launch business.

Finally the dark horse here is the 'previously unexploited used for heavy things in space' which is to say some business or process that is tremendously more competitive in space than it is on Earth which grows the heavy launch business faster than SpaceX can scale up.

I worked for SpaceX but now I work for Bezos. I definitely think BO is years away... but not a decade. I don't think they'll compete for the same payloads at first but eventually they will. Bezos has significantly more money to dump into this problem than Elon.

There are plenty of other reasons, beyond the money, I don't think it will be that long before BO really starts to compete.

They are the only direct competitor on technology development. In 10 years, BO aims to be flying reusable rockets larger than the Falcon 9. You can't say that about and other company (except for SpaceX).

They are more directly a competitor for talent. Rocket engineering is a small world.

I think it would be far more correct to say "Mr. Musk faces potential competition from another billionaire."

Though ULA is buying engines from BO.

This interview with Tom Mueller (CTO of SpaceX) suggests that competitors have had to go back to the drawing board after seeing SpaceX accomplish wrt their low cost systems.

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/6b043z/tom_mueller_...

That rocket is going to be the real game-changer. I would say that the Falcon 9 is evolutionary, you know, a reusable rocket that greatly reduces the cost of access to space. Maybe we can achieve ten reduction in cost over, you know, like what ULA or the Russians or the Chinese are doing, with the Falcon. But we want like a hundred or more reduction in costs; and that’s what the Mars rocket’s gonna do. That’s going to be the revolutionary rocket.

So once we’re flying that, all other rockets will probably be obsolete. <laughs> Likely Blue Origin is working on a fully-reusable rocket <inaudible> But we’ve really changed this industry that the other guys are really scrambling. It’s pretty funny to watch this, because when we first started the company 15 years ago, my fifteen-year anniversary was Monday, May 1st. <clapping> Thank you.

We started the company on May 1st, 2002. Well, I started there; I consider—. Elon incorporated the company I think in February, but he didn’t have any employees yet. But I consider when he had his first employees when he had his company. But anyway, over the fifteen years, we’ve gotten, you know, this far; and when I was first hiring people, you know, that’s when I heard <inaudible> money to develop this rocket. And then we built the Falcon 1, which had a single Merlin engine on it, could throw about 1k lbs into LEO; and they said, you guys, you guys were able to build a small rocket. But you’ll never be able to build an EELV-class, EELV-mission class rocket. And so we built the Falcon 9 and started flying it. And they said you’d never be able to reuse it; you’ll never be able to get to the space station. And at some point, you stop listening to it. And I think it’s great, you know, if people think what you’re doing is impossible then you must be doing the right thing. You can still find the YouTube video online where people are critiquing our recovery thing as being photoshopped or CGI’d. That’s pretty high praise, when people don’t actually believe you’re doing. <laughter>

And you know, we were ridiculed by the other big companies in the launch vehicle business. At first, they ignored us; and then they fought us; and then they— we found out; they found out that they couldn’t really win in a fair fight because we were successful and we were, you know, factors of two or three or probably even five lower costs than what they can do. So then it becomes an unfair fight, where they, you know, try to destroy you politically, and use other means. And then at some point, they figure out that they’ve got to do what you’re doing. So there’s a lot of talk at these other companies about how they’ll make reusable rockets; recover the engines, recover the stages, come up with a much lower-cost rocket so that they can compete. You know, there’s no way that they ULA would have considered buying engines from Blue Origin except for the pressure that SpaceX is putting on them. There’s no way that the French would have quickly abandoned the Ariane 5 and moved to the Ariane 6 design because— except for the pressure we’re putting on. So we’re really changing the world. The Russians are saying they’re coming up with a rocket that can beat SpaceX, which is entertaining, <laughs> which is entertaining, because they’ve been working on their Angara rocket for 22 years, and launched it once. And suddenly they’re going to be coming up with a low-cost one.

It's crazy that Bezos is investing a billion a year consistently into BO. At some point you'd think BO would catch up.

It could've that BO can't attract enough talent. Bezos might not be spending enough time at BO and perhaps the prospects aren't as great there.

BO's New Sheppard is far advanced into sending tourists into space, albeit not in orbit.

Think of Musk as Howard Hughes+, think of Bezos as John Carmack+.

Bezos is the richest man in the world, and he definitely knows what he is doing. If anyone is able to compete with Musk it is Bezos... sorry for all these assorted Commies on the other side of the globe.

The article says 7 venture-backed companies, but this awkward adjective was dropped from the title.

Saudi Aramco is indeed much more valuable than the lot combined, but it's not exactly a startup.

You're improperly editing... both the HN title and the NYT piece say "One of the (start your quote) World's most valuable privately held companies".

This is what you call a fluff piece. HN and the broader computer technology industry is sycophantic for Elon Musk, and will ignore that all of his companies would be dead in the water if it weren't for the questionable appropriation of government funds, at least if they spent and marketed the way that they do. The products are great, but the money comes out of everyone's pockets. You're all paying for some guy's Model S.

Whence this myth that Musk doesn't love money, just because he makes his money making cool tech?

http://variety.com/gallery/elon-musk-buys-fifth-bel-air-home...

http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-mclaren-f1-hypercar... wrecked-it-2015-6

Yeah I found the valuation mildly depressing for similar contexts.. considering the total value of spaceX is less than half of the proposed ~increase~ to annual US military expenditure this year.

We could afford 2 fully-blown spaceX per year just by maintaining our present disproportionately large military rather than expanding it by roughly a Great Britain this year.

Each and every valuation attempt of a private tech company by the mainstream press takes the number of shares outstanding and multiplies it by the share price at the last round, pretending that preferred shares are valued as common. Since the round details are usually sealed (e.g., a company could in theory offer preferred shares with 100x liquidation pref and 25% annual preferred dividend, which would completely wipe out every shareholder except for the investors in the last round), the press doesn't really have a good way to value debt+equity instruments.

Wait a decade and spaceX will have the following line item:

100% of all interplanetary travel, shipping and trade.

Also counting up the company value based on investor deals is weird in itself. Just because I buy 1% of a startup for $10k, doesn't mean I would buy 100% for $1m.

Comparing SpaceX with Uber is like comparing apples to oranges.SpaceX may be inventing stuff but Uber solves a common problem for everyone around the world. I don't need to think twice about going from point A to point B without much hassle. And coming to the invention part, I believe rocket science is as much difficult as serving million requests concurrently and consistently without affecting user experience anywhere in the process. If Uber's product is evading taxes and regulations, then Google's products are just trying to make you click on some random ads. As a fellow hacker, you know what hard problems i am trying to talk about and we should respect that. I agree uber has some problems internally but they don't deserve to be disrespected.

Technically both company wants to take people from point A to point B. But those points vary widely though.

As someone from India, I have huge respect for Uber. The taxi unions here were looting people. They were quite arrogant. In Bangalore, most auto taxi drivers would happily stay idle for the whole day, and try to make some quick bucks during the rush hours by charging 300% or 400% extra, until Uber came and killed their arrogance.

Uber may not have had the same level of technical innovations as SpaceX. But they do have mammoth execution challenges, to the scale that no company might have had to face so far. For eg, in India, in each of the 29 states , they have to deal with the regulators of each state. In hundreds of cities, they have to deal with the respective taxi unions. Extrapolate it to a global scale , I can't even imagine.

My respects to both Elon and Travis! Both are my heroes.

I don't think that is a fair comparison, Uber has revolutionized the transport industry. It has direct impact on you and me right now. Space X does not have such a direct impact for the rest of us.

Uber (and its competitors) have significantly improved lives of millions of people around the world. SpaceX only promises to do so.

The best thing that Uber has done (whatever its other flaws) is challenge the Taxi/Union/Government monopoly.

More taxes and regulations are NOT good things.

Why not do a limited IPO that ensures he retains control.

Don't the people working for SpaceX deserve to have liquidity?

Isn't it fair for the general public to have the ability to profit off of his epic feats?

His plan was "certainly not before we get to Mars", so don't worry about it happening any time soon. This big valuation will smooth the way to developing the BFR, though - and that's the big deal for SpaceX.

SpaceX will be bought by Tesla within 10 years anyway.

A world in which a whole lot more people take cabs than buy tickets to space. :-)

$20B is right around NASA's budget. At least society is consistent in valuing space exploration.

A world where valuation is roughly proportional to the number of rounds of investment you went through.

If you already have a solid path to profitability, you don't need to court investors as often as a hemorrhaging company does.

World of demand, automobile industry was just the same 100 years ago.

Does being publicly traded necessarily mean you focus on the short term nowadays? We've got companies like Snap who issue non voting shares. I imagine SpaceX could offer common shares that have no voting rights, accept all future dilution and require you punch yourself in the head on Tuesdays and they'd still have a pretty decent offering.

>> Excellent news, even if the round is peculiarly undersized.

Yeah it smells like an attempt to increase their valuation, which this accomplishes. If they IPO those investors from a while back can cash out, but I wouldn't sell SpaceX at this point if I was able to own it. Unless there is some potential disaster we don't know about.

Based on most of the big funding rounds happening these days, I just assumed it was SoftBank.

So.. Apple?

Revenue != valuation

(but you might still be correct!)

Huawei is private and did about the same revenue as Google last year.

In startup investments like this one the media basically make a simple factor of the percentage an investor gains and the price he's paying for it. There is no value to that number besides nice newspaper titles.

Real evaluation is the same as for any other company, however in a private company you have less data to go with, the data can't be relied upon as much (since the source is mostly the company itself), and all of these risks get increased by the company being relatively new and not profitable yet. In exchange for the risk investors hope to gain similar growth of company value after they purchased their shares. Therefore most investors mostly look for factors that show huge growth chances, instead of looking at traditional health factors.

In the sense that it is a number that is taken to represent how much money someone would have to spend to buy it, but is only loosely correlated to the amount of money you would have to spend if you actually tried to buy it, yes.

It's different in that publicly traded company market caps are usually based on the value of common stock. The valuation touted in headlines for private companies is usually the implied value of a new, privileged block of stock. The common stock is not valued at the same amount.

But, only IPO all those special classes of stock convert to common stock. So in the success case, yes, valuation and market cap are eventually consistent.

really? is that a joke?

They don't need Brownsville, they need both the Florida pads up and running. Brownsville will add even more, but the Florida pads are more important.

It'll be interesting to watch if they can quickly catch up to SpaceX. If he really does sink 1 billion a year into the company they certainly should be able to.

I'm all for more competition driving down costs.

The liberal backlash against Amazon is also coming.

I have nothing against Musk in particular except that every one of his companies runs off of government largesse one way or another--SpaceX is pretty cool, though, I give him that.

We shouldn't succumb to cults of personality.

Well, you are free to start your own company in the space or electric car industries.