Don't forget about IRIS2!
But we are decently far from a situation where Iris2 has a dedicated consumer arm that spits out millions of consumer grade standard terminals that people can set up within minutes.
We are still very early, with contracts just signed and many questions still open. And ESA not exactly having a track record of great execution.
Lets remember this system even if you are insane optimistic will not exist fully before 2031. Likely years after that if you take into account all the ongoing issues. And even when it finally arrives, the capacity isn't really designed for mass users against Starlink anyway.
Amazon is not a competitor until they actually have a viable product which they may never achieve.
Well, the US sphere of influence, at least.
Musk's aggravating enough of Europe that he may find that door is closing and locking.
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
Tesla integrated other peoples cells into a nice system, but they were never uniquely good at that. They were successful because they invested a huge amount into scaling battery manufacture faster then anybody in the beginning. Something that everybody could replicate.
SpaceX on the other hand has a true technical advantage. But its also a much smaller market.
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.
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.
(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)
A Mars mission is more of a Mars mission than launching something which isn't on a mission and doesn't go to Mars isn't very difficult to understand, unless you're actively trying not to. I'd already pointed out that the choice of launch vehicle is largely irrelevant to ESCAPADE's success; no shit they've got their own propulsion. The roadster would have needed it (and a suitable launch window or funky itinerary) to actually get to Mars too. I don't think it's crazy that despite having the engineers and cash to have got to Mars already SpaceX are being beaten by a payload built by one of their newspace contemporaries and launched by another, but a certain SpaceX chap does keep insisting that Mars is the all important destination.
If we're doing analogies to holidays, the Starman Tesla Roadster definitely hasn't proven its worth for visiting London, even though it's gone beyond it (and SpaceX could have made it hit London if they'd really wanted to, just ask Werner von Braun :-)
Quibbling about whether parties involved in conveying tourists to actually visit London receive undue credit for their segment of the journey, or whether the London Underground is more important than Gatwick flights which don't even reach City boundaries seems like pointless pedantry on the other hand, particularly if deployed in defence of the claim that flying away from London at escape velocity counts as a London visit.
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.
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.
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.
One, this is a nonsense definition. Two, SpaceX meets it. It’s why it hasn’t fundraised for years.
> 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
Wat. Based on this metric, Amazon and Walmart are broke.
First, It's a private company. You can't know that.
Second, even if true, massive investments were made into Starlink and paid into SpaceX, as I pointed out into my post. That counts as fundraising.
> Wat. Based on this metric, Amazon and Walmart are broke.
Not really. Amazon pays a lot, and for IT Manager roles, so does Walmart.
Private companies still have shareholders and audited financials.
> massive investments were made into Starlink and paid into SpaceX, as I pointed out into my post. That counts as fundraising
No. If I invest $1 in SpaceX and it invests that in Starlink, that’s $1 of fundraising.
> Amazon pays a lot, and for IT Manager roles, so does Walmart
They also pay other people peanuts. I know plenty of people whose net effectives at SpaceX are seven to eight figures. That doesn’t obligate them to pay top dollar for every role.
Okay, I'll bite. And what if you "invest" $1 in Starlink, and Starlink immediately "invests" that $1 in SpaceX, while also giving SpaceX starlink shares?
I guess I don't get to make the "wait, isn't that Elon Musk paying Elon Musk" argument, despite it being true?
I mean I even wish you were correct, but by my estimates the most optimistic view of SpaceX is that they're still about 400% too expensive to get global satellite internet working, when launching at cost. That's a remarkable achievement ... but not good enough. It's so close it really sucks. On the other hand, I hate AT&T as much as the next guy but I also don't want a global mobile internet monopoly replacing them. And if Starlink is going to have competitors the value drops by half easily.
> They also pay other people peanuts ...
Well my point is, of course, that SpaceX pays very little compared to Amazon and Walmart for roles that pay a lot at Amazon and Walmart. SpaceX pays only a little better than NASA, and NASA pays about double what you get in an academic position.
Oh, and yes, double what you get in an academic position is pretty badly paid, especially considering what most NASA engineers are capable of.
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.
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.
Boeing for comparison has a 2x multiple (65b rev with a 154b valuation).
Like Starliner?
> SpaceX has .... good vibes?
...if by "good vibes" you mean:
- 138 rocket launches last year
- Global low-latency internet
It's preferable to 3G or being stranded in the woods, but there are definitely points where I wondered if a 4G LTE hotspot would have been faster for home internet.
From my understanding, physics would not allow that (for a decent, not oversubscribed 4G LTE mobile connection and backhaul). But those parameters exist for satellite internet, too.
You don't need either of these to justify the thesis. Just LEO constellations.
Monopoly may be fleeting. Advantage, no.
Again, we're looking at a decade plus of SpaceX having a decided advantage in putting mass in orbit. That could mean more capability, more capacity, faster deployment of new technology or even more margin (since you can go cheap on station keeping).
737 MAX crashing and killing people due to slapped-together flight control integration.
737 MAX having windows blow out due to sheer manufacturing incompetence.
KC-46 deliveries being rejected due to literal tools being found in fuel tanks.
Boeing HAD an over 100 year history of delivering. You can build a thousand bridges. No one's calling you a bridgebuilder after you shag just one sheep.
One of them flew six flights successfully, got contract extended further to 14 flights for a total of 4.93 billion. They also flew other paying customers seven times.
In that time, the second one flew once with astronauts, and had so many problems that they ended up coming home on the first guy's spacecraft.
I will let you figure out who is who.
Consistent delivery at all levels indeed.
Spending taxpayer money towards lazy union worker > good.
Spending less money towards hardworking non-union worker that actually delivers something > bad.
Funny world we live in.
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
China and Blue Origin are Europe may be funding the research, but Arianespace ensures it's more than a decade away from matching today's Falcon Heavy.
> 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
Because it's cheaper and more frequent.
The thing is that you can't put a price tag on national security. For example Ukraine got F16s. Good plane. However after a spat between Zelensky a Trump, Ukrainian F16 got no new updates to their jammers, which temporarily degraded the plane performance and Ukrainians needed to pull them out of frontlines.
Sometimes it is just better to fly on a plane which is not the top performer, but which you can control and manufacture or which a neighbor with same geopolitical problems like you can control and manufacture - i.e. Swedish SAAB JAS39
Same with space launches. Furthermore SpaceX is US company, so US government will want to know everything about the payload, probably down to the schematics and software, which is a big no-no for national security, but even for IP protection - what is stopping US government to supplying your IP to your US competitor? Nothing.
Of course you can. It costs more, but a finite amount more.
Your argument is it'sz worth paying that cost. I agree. But those cases are limited, both by the customer base and that additional cost.
SpaceX is not launching non-U.S. national security payloads. That's not great for American power. But it's a rounding error for a launch provider putting mass in orbit over three times a week [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
I wouldn’t make business or investment decisions based on any assumptions about “alienation.” I was just in Tokyo for a week of meetings with various business professionals, and there was zero sign of any “alienation.” I was expecting to spend most of the time talking about tariffs and nobody even about them. Everyone instead was focused on the new Prime Minister’s faux pas commenting on the security of Taiwan.
Just one set of data points, of course, but consider whether this concept of alienation is real or a creation of US media.
Blue Origin is losing billions every year, its not hobby of the richest person in the world, not true competitor. Remember rockets are small markets and everybody other then SpaceX is losing money.
Europe and China has literally 0 shot at breaking into the places SpaceX dominates. Europe will take another 10 years before they get a reusable rocket and even then, launching something like Starship wouldn't happen for another long time after that.
China simply can't compete in these markets by law, in the US. Them having reusable rockets doesn't matter for SpaceX. I don't think China will have Starlink competitor that can compete globally anytime soon. But that might be a real competitor eventually.
Kupiter is arguable a more real competitor.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years.
That's a gigantic, gigantic, huge and absurdly large assumption.
A lot would need to happen for all current US allies to block all SpaceX products.
Not to suggest that 61x multiple is justified, but your counter argument doesn't really work.
I think the better argument against the 61x multiple is that the overall market simply isn't big enough. SpaceX would have to break into many other markets and how to do that is difficult to say for a number of reasons.
The launching is routine, the landing and being able to turn around the same booster again in a few weeks is a capability no one else has. Their ability to launch so often came in handy over the past few years when other providers faltered. They were able to, on short notice, take over launches from Ariane 6, Vulcan, and Antares because of development delays and Soyuz because of political problems. No other medium launch provider can fit a launch in on short notice, they need years of lead time for one, let alone multiple. For SpaceX they just bump a Starlink payload a few months from now and replace it with the new one.
> all for their not as good as fiber internet
Starlink is making money. Its not just stealing market share from the incumbents but its significantly expanded the market.
They have made explicit from the beginning that they are not competing with wired internet service.
I would hope so, the Shotwell 2018 TED Talk put point to point flights for Starship for around the price of business class in commercial service by 2028, Musk said still on track a few years later after the move away from aspirated cooling, a bit later I think they made the move to aspirational timelines.
After that I decided I wasn't going to count Musk's eggs before they are hatched. What has been accomplished with Starship so far is impressive, that should be acknowledged. But big todo items, heat shield, refueling and reusability are still to be proved and we'll have to wait and see if and when they are achieved.
Weird. I must have been imagining the Falcon 9 launching more mass to orbit this year than the entirety of the rest of the planet. More than all the flights of the Space Shuttle program combined.
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.
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.
Ten years ago, smart people said the launch market couldn't possibly grow beyond $3 to 5bn.
There is a tonnne of induced demand when it comes to launch. In LEO alone we have telecommunications, sensing and defence applications, most of which don't do well when put on the same bird. Add to that potential power-transmission uses and a global race to the Moon and Mars and it seems even if Starship can be mass manufactured, production will be the limiter, not demand.
> combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative
Doubtful for broadband. Probable for rural and maybe even suburban cellular.
Telecommunications is overwhelmingly the largest space sector, it was in the 90s and is today. Sensing has been around for 60+ years and has grown fast both military and civilian, Planet and co. But its small compared to Telecommunication. And in order to rival that you would need many, many more years of incredibly fast growth.
As for defense application, the most absurd possible one would be Golden Dome. And granted that would be a big chucnk of money if SpaceX can get a huge piece. But I don't think Goldon Dome will happen anytime soon or will be quite a big difference.
You are right that cellular will grow and that's a vector for continued growth of Starlink. So there is decently growth and a lot yet to do. SpaceX a growth company, but justifying 800b on that is a bit questionable. They would need to like 5x in revenue and continue to show massive growth.
As for general 'induced demand', maybe, but we have already seen some of that, and there is growth, but nowhere near the amount of growth for SpaceX to go from 100s to 1000s of launches. Specially with Starship.
There needs to be 3-5 other telecom sized sectors that are actually real. Defense MIGHT be 1.
I just don't see it. Tourism, space mining and space manufacturing would need to happen big time.
There is a lot of talk about 'data centers in space' but I think that is silly. Space solar is even worse.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1iarntp/orbit...
"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.
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.
mikkupikku•2mo ago
modeless•2mo 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.
MichaelNolan•2mo ago
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.
delichon•2mo ago
idontwantthis•2mo ago
ACCount37•2mo ago
Propellant transfer is relevant because it's vital for sending entire Starships to Moon and Mars - which are the exciting Starship missions. This includes Artemis. But commercially? Artemis contract isn't even a large part of SpaceX's revenue.
mikkupikku•2mo ago
The heat shield is a huge problem though. Without the heat shield, there's simply no way SpaceX can use Starship to make money.
modeless•2mo ago
panick21_•2mo ago
But we pipe around cold stuff in space internal to space ships already quite often.
What is the fundamental limitation that you worried about?
I would say the head-shield is far harder an an unsolved problem, specially with re-use. Refurbish is not economically viable, specially not after 1 launch. That would be against every design goal of Starship. It has never been demonstrated in a practical fashion.
eitau_1•2mo ago
standardUser•2mo ago
modeless•2mo ago
Also, I wonder how receptive the world will be to Chinese ISPs given their history of internet censorship at home.
maxglute•2mo ago
I think the world, well mainly govs, many of whom who are already running Huawei network gear would appreciate PRC willingness to accomodate local filtering (censorship) rules with how world is trending towards cyber soveignty.
That said, I can see SpaceX being elevated to Boeing tier strategic asset to compete, assuming Musk badblood doesn't interfere.
modeless•2mo ago
Meanwhile the Starship factory is looking like it will be quite productive once the design is locked down.
maxglute•2mo ago
new-terminus•2mo ago
maxglute•2mo ago
wat10000•2mo ago
mikkupikku•2mo ago
htrp•2mo ago
Is there a tldr someone put together here ?
firesteelrain•2mo ago
minetest2048•2mo ago
As much as I want to fly with Chinese rocket to encourage launcher competition and redundancy, export controls prevent me from doing that.
zihotki•2mo ago
bell-cot•2mo ago