Comment by convexly
6 months ago
I'm genuinely waiting to see at what the valuation lands at. The gap between what SpaceX charges per launch and what everyone else charges is so wide that the moat basically is the rocket. Hard to compare against anything even now.
That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though; costs have already fallen to the point where launch isn't the biggest cost of space hardware any more, the competition is hotting up, and whilst launch costs give Starlink an advantage over other LEO satcomms constellations, other countries have strategic incentives to underwrite the existence of that competition, and once those assets have been sent to space it's a straight fight for subscribers in a remote broadband connectivity market which is definitely real but also looks... actually not that huge, relative to a trillion dollar valuation, unless they're able to drop their prices to wired broadband levels without service degradation. Launch cadence is a bigger advantage for SpaceX than cost, but again something other entities plausibly will match, when the demand is there.
The real question is what comes first: viable commercial large scale infrastructure in space that might create new demand for SpaceX launches, or the competition?
SpaceX is pitching their own orbital data centres as a ready to go source of demand for lots and lots of Starship launches, but the unit economics of those vs boring old ground-based server racks and solar farms look dubious even before one considers just how convenient a justification it is rolling Elon's loss making businesses into the IPO.
The cadence point is understated. SpaceX launched 130+ times in 2025. The next closest was around 15. That's not a gap that closes in 2-3 years even with heavy subsidies, because it's not just the rocket, you need to account for the operational framework of doing it every 3 days.
the cadence is very important, but I don't think the operational framework is much of a moat (not having reusability and/or actual demand is a bigger obstacle to overcome). SpaceX went from 30 to >130 between 2021 and 2024, launching most of the satellites currently in orbit in the process.
You don't do that without pre-planning or being very very good at what you do, but most of the competition (including those that will fail) is targeting that. They don't need to scale as big or as fast as SpaceX to deliver enough comms satellites to orbit to kill any hopes of Starlink becoming a permanent low-latency connectivity monopolist. Plus of course most competitors in the connectivity space are able to spend a fraction of their overall hardware budget launching on SpaceX...
>That feels like a surprisingly weak moat though
Lol, the classic "I can build a reusable rocket in a weekend" comment.
Valuations are always more of an art than a science but in what world is SpaceX worth more than Meta today? Maybe the $1.75T is to find that world.
The valuation only makes sense if you price in Starlink becoming a top 3 telecom and Starship opening up entirely new markets. Possible, sure, but the launch business alone doesn't get you anywhere near 1.75T. They're betting the multiple on revenue lines that don't fully exist yet.
Yep the only way it makes sense is a combo of Starlink + AI data centers in space in 10 years.
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In the same world where Tesla is worth more than every other automaker in the world combined.
I mean... in what world is it worth less?
Meta has increasingly ephemeral digital mindshare and no AI play. SpaceX has a near monopoly on access to the rest of the galaxy.
The question for me is just timeline. The "rest of the galaxy" revenue is decades out, while Starlink revenue is now. Most of the 1.75T has to be priced on Starlink working at telecom scale. If not, 1.75T seems like a steal for the first true "Universal" investment...