It's quite amazing how this values SpaceX at 10bn, less than 50% of WhatsApp. This makes me think that there's something systemically wrong with the current incarnation of post-oligarchic shareholder-controlled short term interest based capitalism. One can argue that WhatsApp has better money making potential than SpaceX, but that is only because the whole system is warped.
While I see your point, I think there are two important things to remember here. (Note: I understand the long term implications of an interplanetary species, just providing context)
A) whatsapp improves the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people. You don't necessarily need an absurd customer lifetime value to get a $19b valuation with that many people using your product.
B) SpaceX provides almost no current value to anybody. And the people it does provide value to are "free riders" in the sense that they love watching space travel and get to watch SpaceX regardless of whether or not they pay for it.
Just an inexact thought experiment. Let's say we poll the roughly 1b people living in first world, and ask them each to pay $10 to see SpaceX do whatever SpaceX does. How many people even think it's worth $10?
Let's say we poll the roughly 1b people living in first world, and ask them each to pay $10 to see SpaceX do whatever SpaceX does. How many people even think it's worth $10?
I just wan't to add that the problem is not that SpaceX provides less to humanity than WhatsApp.
The problem is that most people are not really far-sighted, but only see things which benefit themselves in a predictable amount of time.
Why companies like SpaceX (or NASA) are important has already been answered with Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa
>The problem is that most people are not really far-sighted, but only see things which benefit themselves in a predictable amount of time.
Because most people are not upper middle class to wealthy. They are forced to be concerned about paying for food/healthcare/education so their life tends to have different priorities.
The other problem is that your line of 'far-sighted' is completely arbitrary. Someone could easily argue that SpaceX is wasting its time with rockets and we should be spending more time studying theoretical physics to figure out better ways to travel long distances in space.
> Because most people are not upper middle class to wealthy. They are forced to be concerned about paying for food/healthcare/education so their life tends to have different priorities.
Which is a problem because if only they could (not that the system will let them do that easily) stop and think a little further, in a little less selfish way, they'd likely figure a way to improve their living conditions.
But hell, that applies also to the "upper middle class to wealthy", especially in terms of convenience. See NIMBYsm, or people fighting tooth and nail for their right to use cars cheaply in dense urban areas. People tend to defect instead of cooperating, for their own demise (and of everyone else who knows better but can't do much against an uncoordinated mob).
>Which is a problem because if only they could (not that the system will let them do that easily) stop and think a little further, in a little less selfish way, they'd likely figure a way to improve their living conditions.
This is a completely uninformed view of what it's like to be in this position. Everything in life for them is essentially a borderline crisis (I witnessed my parents going through this). Finding new jobs is extremely difficult so you have to make major compromises to keep your current one. This is even more important when you can't build any savings to cushion the impact of unemployment.
What exactly do you think they can do to "stop and think a little further"? This might be an option if you have no family to support, but otherwise it's a ridiculous notion.
Practical experimentation doesn't equate to rocket use at all if someone fundamentally believes that rockets are not the way forward. e.g. We don't try to launch things to other solar systems with sling shots, but that doesn't mean we aren't doing practical experimentation.
People are already chipping in - SpaceX gets a big portion of its income from NASA which is funded by US taxpayers, and also indirectly by all the ISS partners (Russia, Europe, Japan, others?).
While I can see how whatsapp can be valued higher than SpaceX, I don't see how this logic makes sense on any level. You could use the exact same logic to make any B2B company seem worthless when compared to a consumer app.
The advancement of science is of quite significant benefit to humankind in the long run and it affects everybody in a way a brand product implementing a known design does not. In fact, if it staves off extinction, even if it only matters in the far far future, the number of people affected could well be more than the one hundred billion who have lived on earth for the past 40,000 years.
They're definitely advancing engineering. They're also significantly improving space transportation infrastructure, which is crucial to getting more space-related science (and that includes a lot of stuff that is of terrible importance to biotechnology, which is likely to be The Next Big Thing after IT). Apart from that, they're directly working towards making humans interplanetary species and - as we just learned - fixing communication infrastrucutre before that.
Add to that the amount of interest they generate among people - they're beginning to achieve what Star Trek did once, making space cool again. I personally know people who are dreaming (and some moving towards) aerospace career because of SpaceX, and with the amount of hype you see around the Internet, I'm pretty sure we'll soon have a generation of engineers inspired by Elon's companies.
Oh, and they do all that for dirt cheap.
I don't know how good they're on an absolute scale, or compared to the next best alternative, but they're definitely very cost-effective in terms of current and potential benefits to humanity.
If SpaceX succeeds in significantly reducing launch costs, then they will enable a tremendous increase in all sorts of science (and industry, but you're talking about science.) There's tons of stuff to learn outside of Earth's gravity well, but right now we're restricted by the absurdly high cost of getting there. Most of the money now spent in all areas of activity that take place off-Earth is spent on or because of the high cost of getting there: launch services, making the machines light enough to launch affordably; making them robust enough to survive without maintenance; making them super-fancy to justify the cost; doing lots of simulations because you can't afford to test in the real environment.
For one small example: Space is by far the best place to put observatories. Yet only a few special--and small ones--are there. What if observatories were routinely space-based?
SpaceX may not be doing the science themselves, but have the capability to act as a huge multiplier to those who are doing it. A much higher multiplier than any feasible amount of money shovelled into the existing system would create.
I totally agree. WhatsApp right now affects a lot of people a little. SpaceX right now affects small amount of people a lot, but if that satellite project pans out this will turn into affecting a lot of people greatly. SpaceX has a much, much bigger prospect for benefiting humanity than WhatsApp can dream of.
I am not so sure that is the reason for WhatsApp crazy validation. I feel that the reason for that was that it represented a danger for Facebook and Mark wisely acquired at any cost.
WhatsApp is big outside of the US because (at least in Panama, were I was born) text messages are not included in the mobile phone plan; however, you can get a data plan for a monthly fee and keep in contact without additional charges. In the US most people use text messages to communicate.
C) SpaceX also has considerable risk of failure so you have to factor this into a valuation and investment. Whatsapp has eliminated much of this risk and is already a developed and implemented product.
I am not saying Whatsapp has anywhere near the potential value of SpaceX but it is important to factor the amount of risk given the stage a project is at.
.. by a small amount, yes. Communication is valuable to people. Having a better alternative to SMS is evidently something people prefer, however slightly.
Agreed communication is valuable, but there are many options available. Just when I see "improving lives" I think of say clean drinking water in parts of Africa that don't have it.
Yeah I am being pedantic, but sometimes I get annoyed at how much these tech companies big themselves up when in the big scheme of human things they are largely irrelevant.
WhatsApp is a consumer product. It lives as it breathes. As long as people/consumer keeps pumping in money & time to it, its value will stay or rise from its current value. Once that stops and people/consumer stop using it, its value will eventually fall.
SpaceX on the other hand is not a consumer product yet, but is aiming to become one. Consider it just like Boeing or AirBus, nobody would have valued them as a multi-billionaire company ( back in 1900s when they were founded). Their technological advancements and the development phase would have been same as SpaceX right now.
But eventually it became a very integral part of human life. They have become a consumer product, their value is now because of people using it daily. And unlike WhatsApp people won't stop using air-travel.
Everyday people do not invest directly into it like they do(?) for WhatsApp, but indirectly by using airline services they are paying for it. Similarly for SpaceX everyday people aren't investing in it right now but eventually ( as per SpaceX's ambition ) people would just like they are doing for air-travel.
I think comparison is ok, but people are missing an important distinction - yes, the system works exactly as one would expect it to. There are good reasons for the system to value WhatsApp higher than SpaceX. The algorithm's implementation is correct. The problem is, we're using a wrong algorithm - a system that begins to increasingly value wrong things.
Capitalism as a system has many impersonal qualities, but capitalism per se does not value anything. It just provides mechanism (market prices, investment dollars, and so on) by which the value that people attribute to things can be known.
If "capitalism" values the "wrong" things it's because people at large have the "wrong" values. If that is a problem, it's probably not an economic one, but something deeper.
Nope, capitalism as a system very much values particular outcomes. It's not a machine that perfecly translates human values into economic output; it's a system that actively prefers one type of values over other. The powerful feedback loops of markets that - I very much acknowledge this fact - led us to prosperity we enjoy today have a side effect that is increasingly becoming apparent: they slowly throw away any human value that stands in a way of being more competetive.
Anyway, that's a long topic. The TL;DR of my point is: it's not our values that control the system, it's the system that controls our values.
> And a serious question: How do these people have money and especially free time for this [clever hack involving suspending a jaccuzzi under a bridge]?
That this is actually a serious question shows that there is a strong mismatch between our values and the system we live in.
> Capitalism as a system has many impersonal qualities, but capitalism per se does not value anything.
It values capital and the capitalist class, which is why it was named "capitalism" by its critics (specifically, its socialist critics.)
The free market justifications in terms of Econ 101 simplifications that, in addition to applying to a simplified version of reality in operational terms, also apply to a system different than capitalism as ever actually implemented, came later.
In this case I think the valuations are justifiable.
Imagine that all the people that sent a Whatsapp message in the last year were charged SMS rates for the messages they had sent. How much would that cost them? Well, that's a reasonable rough measure of the value they have derived from Whatsapp. It's an important service that has real immediate benefits for the people using it right now.
SpaceX is a fantsastic venture, I'm very excited by it, but right now it's providing limited economic benefit. The Space Station is an expensive waste of money. A few comms satelites is great, but there haven't been all that many of them. Now, if SpaceX does manage to recover and re-utilise it's boosters that willbe a game changer. Their value will skyrocket (appropriately) and Google will make a killing on their investment. But that hasn't happened yet.
Yeah, imagine investing in things like... the first electricity service provider, or the first telephone, or the first TV. All of those things are multi-billion dollar industries. I'm sure this entire exchange has been played out before for other emergent industries!
The issue is picking a winner. As Warren Buffett points out, there are thousands of bankrupt airlines and car companies. If you pick a loser, you wipe out no matter how well the industry does, as consolidation is inevitable particularly in high barrier to entry industries. This keeps early valuations low.
And well rockets is really a very broad term which not just includes spacecrafts but also missiles.
SpaceX is unique not for sending 'rockets' but it for being the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft also the first private company to send spacecraft to ISS.
So yes, Space transport/travel is a luxurious and emerging market.
> SpaceX is unique not for sending 'rockets' but it for being the first privately funded company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft also the first private company to send spacecraft to ISS.
In what sense? The SpaceX launches were under NASA contract. Neither STS nor Apollo before it was built purely in-house by NASA; most of the parts were built by Rockwell, Lockheed and others. What's the big distinction here? Just that SpaceX was taking a bigger chunk of the failure risk?
SpaceX retains ownership of the rockets, they sell flights on the rockets rather than the rockets themselves. My understanding is that this is a recent development in the industry. For example, the Shuttles were built by Rockwell but, as I understand it, owned by NASA.
You are confusing two things, NASA outsourcing the parts built by other companies is a contract based project for which NASA was funded by the government. This means if any losses, are faced by NASA/government not the companies which made the parts.
SpaceX is more like a privately funded Space Exploration Company. NASA awarded them the contact not to outsource parts like in earlier projects but for SpaceX's design and technology.
Also the NASA contract to send cargo to ISS was one thing of the many SpaceX is doing. So in a lot of sense it is unique. Not sure why you think the ISS contract is the only thing what SpaceX is living on.
SpaceX comes with, well, an astronomical (snicker) level of risk attached to it. So I suppose the idea is that SpaceX might well end up being worth a lot more than WhatsApp, but WhatsApp and its user base are worth a lot now. It is also unlikely that they will end up not being worth anything in the future (if we hit a second dotcom bubble WhatsApp might end up being worth a lot less than their current valuation, but like AOL, it won't be literally worth nothing). SpaceX might.
There is also some level of tragedy of the commons problem going on, in which SpaceX benefits all of us every time they successfully test a new design, but it only benefits their investors when they manage to get mining rights to the moon or set up martian tourism or the like. Goals which are possible - which is the impressive thing - but still very risky bets.
>>We are many, many decades away from this being even close to a reality.
If there aren't companies like SpaceX (or governments doing similar work) we'll never be any closer to that reality. Mines on the moon and O'Neill cylinders in space aren't going to pop into existence in 2098 or something, they're going to be built on top of the foundations being laid by SpaceX (and others) today.
Maybe SpaceX will last long enough to profit from it, maybe they won't. It's still a better use of $1 billion of Google's money than another social network or whatever.
No, we're not decades away, we're dollars away. A base on Mars in feasible with today's technology, see for example the Mars Direct plan by Zubrin. The only thing we need are about 30 billion dollars, that's like eight aircraft carriers or 1/3 ISS.
The Beagle landed on Mars and was unresponsive. The last SpaceX test rocket failed to land. If all we need is money then there would be no failures that would result in masses of tourists dying or billions of dollars in mining equipment being destroyed.
But alas the world doesn't work like that. It takes time to repeat the design, build, test process until you get it right. And no throwing money at the problem doesn't result in a quicker solution:
Beagle 2 hitched a ride on Mars Express which was and still is a very successful low cost mission. It’s still orbiting Mars and being used for scientific research more than a decade into its mission.
The total cost including that decade of operations is about €300M (until 2013) – and less than 20 percent of that was spent on Beagle.
But that’s not even the whole story. Venus Express was heavily borrowing from Mars Express and did consequently cost substantially less (€85M vs €150M for launch and spacecraft, excluding subsequent operations and in the case of Mars Express also Beagle 2; total mission cost until its end in 2014 €220M).
Beagle 2 and the whole Mars Express mission was really put together on a shoestring budget. It’s more a demonstration that you can do a lot with a little, really, than anything else …
Other then that SpaceX has shown incredible process in their re-usability quest, the latest failed landing included. They have been on a steady march towards re-usability, without any major roadblocks (except the usual delays). There is nothing there that shows them hitting any kind of wall, actually.
The Apollo program is a remarkably direct and relevant example of throwing money at a problem resulting in a quicker solution. There is of course a limit, but we're well below that point now. And with our current rate of experimental launches, many employees won't even remain in the job long enough to experience more than one of them. Speeding the rate up could have exponential increases in productivity.
This is disingenous. The last SpaceX rocket successfully returned from suborbital flight onto the target landing site. They just underestimated the amount of hydraulic fluid needed to make a proper landing (but then again, they hit the barge anyway!). It's basicaly a 99% success with a minor error that was found and will be corrected.
Stupid failures always happen, but at this point we can definitely assume that yes, they have a reusable stage.
The last SpaceX didn't just return from a suborbital flight, it returned after successfully completing its mission to boost the upper stages on their way to the ISS (where they eventually arrived without issue). As long at the booster was going to come crashing down into the ocean anyway, they decided to use it to test their experimental landing capabilities, and came remarkably close to an unexpected success.
The Beagle was the cheapest Mars mission ever (~50 million), and the investigation attributed the failure directly to not having enough money to do things properly. Again, dollars, not decades.
> The last SpaceX test rocket failed to land.
It was a test, an experiment; Musk was describing it as "50/50" beforehand. The mission achieved exactly what it was meant to do.
Sure, I guess the assumption is that those "dollars away" also include the money to run a whole lot of unmanned flights, a bunch of manned-but-risky flights and have some failures (hopefully of the unmanned kind) in the process of making the whole thing repeatable.
SpaceX is in an industry with better financed/politically connected companies and an unpredictable revenue stream. It's a risky business by every definition. WhatsApp by comparison is a stable, very popular, growing and strategically important messaging platform.
And if you think that human-human communication is less valuable than putting a few satellites in space (NASA/ESA/ISRO/etc are the real keys to future space exploration) then I would argue your priorities are a bit warped.
WhatsApp by comparison is a stable, very popular, growing and strategically important messaging platform.
I'd rather phrase that as "WhatsApp by comparison is a currently stable, currently popular and growing generic platform implementable and implemented by thousands of companies and hobbyyists worldwide with nothing unique about the company except the current user-base, a (mostly free-loading) user-base which has shown great willingness to flock to the next great thing should this service ever do the wrong moves".
You know... The sort of statement you don't make about 20 billion dollar companies. They should have a more solid footing than being trendy right now. To put it in the dryset terms possible: They have no unique value-proposition.
SpaceX is doing real shit which might make an impact on the future of mankind. To me just comparing them in the same context seems offensive.
Have you never heard of network effect ? Having one the size of WhatsApp is absolutely a unique value proposition since it is impossible to replicate due to acquisition costs.
SpaceX is making something physical no doubt. But they aren't the only one and their competitors aren't cute little garage startups.
> Have you never heard of network effect ? Having one the size of WhatsApp is absolutely a unique value proposition since it is impossible to replicate due to acquisition costs.
In 2005, one could have made the same argument about Myspace.
Yup. It's totally possible to replicate the "value proposition" of a network-effect-exploiting service - the easiest way is to just wait a single generation. Younger people tend to avoid things their parents use; it's a problem that Facebook is starting to have right now.
WhatsApp (and similar) will never make any of the invested money back though. Its value is purely in chance that it will grow and someone else will buy you out in a few months or years. Its only valuable asset are users, and they will be gone. So someone at the end of long chain on of rich people will weep.
With SpaceX, there is enormous value in the company as it is, even if it went bankrupt tomorrow.
> (NASA/ESA/ISRO/etc are the real keys to future space exploration)
Now are they? NASA itself now outsourcing its LEO capacity to SpaceX. And SpaceX is much more focused than government agencies thanks to virtue of having a single leader with an idea, as opposed to bureaucracy and CYA-ism. Of course, space exploration is not a one-man endeavour, but I wouldn't dismiss the impact SpaceX already has and likely will have in the future - they're empowering those big space agencies.
>And if you think that human-human communication is less valuable than putting a few satellites in space (NASA/ESA/ISRO/etc are the real keys to future space exploration) then I would argue your priorities are a bit warped.
that is exactly bifurcation point each technological civilization faces (be it whole human race today or China 600 years ago) - to "go in", i.e. collapse into something like ant-colony or to "go out", i.e. explore and expand.
I'm surprised it is the top comment. If I remember correctly, it has been discussed a lot of times on HN. And most of the times, people agreed it wasn't a fair comparison.
I think WhatsApp potential value caps out at 50B or so. SpaceX potential value might be in the trillions (low probability). So while their current valuations might seem 'wrong', the long term potential value might be closer to your value judgement. There are very few large investors with a 20 year time horizon. I am not sure if that is a fault of capitalism. I am not sure another system of resource allocation would do better, do you?
This has nothing to do with short term interest based capitalism. Whether privately held, a charity, or any other structure, if what you are making is not of general interest to the population at large, it's going to have a pretty hard time. The only way to fix that is to eliminate free markets and democracy so people of average or less intelligence/foresight have no say in the appropriation of resources.
People will disagree with you on that, but I think such disagreement misses a crucial observation - economic value was highly correlated to the value for humanity. But as we took all the low-hanging fruits we can see those two senses of value increasingly diverge.
Hell, for a simple analogy, it's like with solid rocket boosters - you should appreciate how far they got you, but you definitely don't want to keep being attached to them when they burn out and decide to not go to space.
SpaceX is the commercialisation of space exploration and that's just how valuation works in commercial applications. It is, however, remiss to value to science and progress in dollar terms. TCP/IP is far more valuable than all of the Internet companies combined but not in dollar terms.
That's similar to saying a toddler is less productive than a recent college graduate.
That is to say: WhatsApp is much further along its individual trajectory than SpaceX is. In decades, the value of SpaceX is likely to eclipse WhatsApp, which in all likelihood won't even exist any longer.
In this analogy you seem to believe the trajectory for this toddler is set in stone. The reality is at it's infancy (which is where Space X is in the grand scheme) it can look very promising but turn out very bad, or a competitor can drastically outpace. Any valuation should discount for the level of risk.
A lot can happen over time. 10 years ago MySpace was by far the dominant social network and Blackberry was the mobile powerhouse. Seemed like neither would fall with so much momentum behind them but we see how that played out.
I think one of the reasons people lose sight of that is because they look back and see all those products, all that improvement in quality of life that capitalism brought us. Those things are undeniable. But one can't infer from this that the system will forever be awesome. It was aligned with human goals initially, but as time goes by, it's less and less aligned.
My guess is that a part of the issue is that VCs can understand WhatsApp. They feel like that can assess it's worth, associated risk, and come up with a valuation independently.
With science based startups the partner at a VC can't easily make an independent assessment. They have to rely on specialists to do tech D&D and they rarely trust them completely. So they shy away from those deals, or they factor the risk into their valuations.
This behavior somewhat ironically can make these investments higher risk. There is a degree to which fund raising at a lower level makes a company a higher risk, because they have less money to work with and can't afford to make mistakes. (the converse is also somewhat true).
Perhaps it's partly because space is seen as higher-risk than social media? The valuation would then be lower because people lower their expectations based on the risk of failure.
