Never understood the business model for SpaceX and Starlink. Huge capital and operational costs without a clear understanding of who is paying for it.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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It’s a FOMO play for morons.
The entire valuation is that they say that they can find $28T of businesses on mars and the moon, that that creating these business ideas is something they can do repeatably.
To be fair, you're only a moron if you are considering it a "hold forever" stock. If you get out in time, or even if you miss-time it, that's just gambling, which only makes you a moron if you can't afford the loss.
No single stock should be a hold forever play (unless you count ETFs as a single stock)
A steady dividend stock might be a hold forever stock. Especially if you don't want to realize the capital gains of the stock's appreciation.
For Starlink and SpaceX, I can probably understand the business model, considering the race to getting more satellites to orbit be it for surveying or in case of Starlink stable Internet anywhere. But anything beyond that, like data centers in space I just ridiculous. No way that their valuation is anywhere near what it is realistically.
I look at Starlink where currently about 6 spacecraft deorbit a week and need replacement as a huge operational cost. Many SpaceX launches are Starlink launches, it raises the question of whether this is a circular or self fulfilling industry.
Its actually a great business model as they need to do actual test flights to build better rockets and instead of that being pure R&D expenses, its supplemented by launching Starlink satellites which generate their own revenue for the company.
Great theory, but the Falcon 9 is already a proven design and most of SpaceX’s R&D is going to the starship, which uses completely different engines and which has blown up or disintegrated just as much as its successfully gotten above the atmosphere. It’s also never actually completed an orbit or delivered a gram of anything to orbit.
Starlink is a useful tool to boost launch numbers precisely so investors think things are better than they actually are. Originally SpaceX burned through government and private investor money. Now that they’ve blown through the entire Artemis budget the interim director of nasa gave them through blatant corruption, and launched even more billion dollar fireworks using private investor money, they are desperately trying to convince the public for more fireworks funds.
I suppose that it is that dependence upon Starlink to boost launch numbers makes me suspicious of the books. The whole thing just feels ponzie scheme.
As far as I understood, I always thought that they just used other people’s rockets to piggyback their own satellites to space basically for free
Haven’t heard that though you need a lot of other launches with space available….
You're not wrong, they were kinda burning money to create a business model. I'm a space fanboy though so I'm glad someone is doing it.
Pretty sad that musk is involved at all, but he started it. More sad that it now has the ai cancer stuck to it.
Still I want humans to go beyond earth and I guess I'm willing to let th devil do it
Starlink is massively profitable, look at their balance sheets. It’s very simple, their users pay them a lot of money to access the internet. Far, far more than the launch costs to maintain the constellation.
Their defense launch business is also profitable, though I haven’t checked how much.
The Starship development and stupid acquisitions (xai) have been a money pit though.
I don’t think Starlink includes their launch fees, leaving that on SpaceX side of the balance sheet. But I haven’t read details.
Starlink is the only part of SpaceX operations that turns a profit.
Rocket launches do not, and xAi is a bottomless money pit just like every other AI venture.
I don’t think that’s quite true. (Happy to be proven wrong if somebody has better numbers than me.)
From what I can see the launch business generated $4.1 billion, but profits in that segment are negative because the $3 billion in Starship development costs are lumped in to that. The overall loss (-$600 million) would instantly turn into great profit if they decided to give up on Starship.
But for sure, xAi is a nightmare. Absolutely Elon trying to bail himself out again.
And doesn't SpaceX now also own xAI and Xitter? He's trying to offload his terrible investments.
Reusable vehicles meant something like 1/20 the per-launch costs of the pre-existing competition? No matter what you want to pay to have put in space, the supplier who reuses equipment will have a huge advantage.
And starlink? Satellite internet access for remote properties used to have all the latency of a return trip to geostationary orbit. Starlink is a massive advantage compared to that.
That’s 59% growth annually, every year, for 10 years straight.
Any miss or early miss throws the schedule off significantly.
Pretty close to Moore's Law, a doubling approximately every 18 months.
If they can get to an astroid with some titanium or other rare minerals, they can probably be worth it. But I don't see that happening in my lifetime
Getting there isn't a problem. The problem is what you do once you're there. There's no way to mine an asteroid and bring those minerals back to earth and I don't see any way for that to change for quite a long time.
Mining such an asteroid will only destroy the metals’ market value into oblivion by nullifying it rarity.
I'm not so sure. That would certainly be the case if you had access to it all at once, but that's almost certainly not how it would work. Just like how we don't have access to all of it's that's available on earth at once. It'll be more like a new mine opening up.
This is assuming we don't mine multiple asteroids at once or open a ton of new mines on a single asteroid. We may get there at some point but that won't be how it starts. It'll almost certainly start as a one off, if it gets there at all.
Debeers model? Artificial scarcity
Want my money? Give me Elon's stock.
“Just trust me, bro.”
I can do this with two hands closed 👍
Doesn't matter, at this rate, what will even be here in a decade?
AI.