Maybe, maybe not. None of these things have proven to have a profitable business model, so how are deriving the value?
Of course, if that doesn't matter to you, there are myriad ways to hand your money over to SpaceX.
SpaceX has wildly bigger upside if the big bets pay off.
Because SpaceX is a private company, none of us really know (publicly) its financial state. It could be profitable at this point.
But of course you can finance Starlink and continue to be, so that part is VC funded.
And they have not received FCC money yet.
This article is from 2017, since then they have done a lot better.
SpaceX always reinvested every penny into development and they have done so for a long time.
Taking a loan, or investment, does not suddenly make a company unprofitable, that would be a silly way of looking at the world.
I don't have any figures for SpaceX, but I suspect the amount of cash they've be able to raise relates directly to the expected future value of the company. That they're able to launch 60 satellites at once for a fraction of the cost of other launch companies probably helps.
Part of the reason I asked what you meant by profitable is that you seem to be conflating operating and capital expenses.
From the perspective of the 'launch-arm' of SpaceX, launch costs are operational expenses and profitability analysis will typically balance that against payment for the service provided.
From the perspective of the 'starlink-arm' of SpaceX, launch costs are capital expenses and should be accounted for by depreciating the cost over the life of the asset (the satellites).
If you want to look at the profitability across the entire business then you have to be very specific about what you're measuring, and clear what you mean when you say profitable - at least if you want your analysis to be useful.
Also worth noting that the article is about data from 2015, which was the first year they had ever landed an orbital-class booster (Falcon 9), and only the one time (in December 2015). The first time they ever re-used a booster for a customer payload was in 2017 (after the WSJ article you cite was published). Since then they've re-used boosters many times, with their recent launch actually being the 8th launch+recovery of the same booster. So what was iffy/nascent in 2015/2017 is now proven/consistent in 2021. They are doing much, much better from when that article as published.
Also are we looking at the same chart? Not sure how you can make the claim that the number of launches has been dropping every year... every year since when? 2020 was the most launches ever, and in 2021 they are expected to do more commercial customer launches than all launches in 2020 + Starlink launches on top of that.
and remove all launches where SpaceX was the customer (a net loss unless the payload they launch has payoff), and specifically look at the GTO launches (the ones that pay the most money). There are fewer and fewer GTO launches, and the number of customers has been going down. A cursory glance shows 2017 had 8, 8 in 2018, 4 in 2019, 2 in 2020, and about 8 planned in 2021 (we'll see, these typically slip quite a bit. The point being that they need profitable launches (not a small satellite they rideshare with 10 starlinks on) to sustain a launch business with that many engineers on it. I think 2021 will launch maybe half the GTO/GEO they're targeting this year due to delays, as was the case in 2020.
Regardless, commercial launches is what I was talking about as well. Do you have a reference for the idea that GTO launches are the only ones which are profitable / significantly more profitable than other launches? I haven't seen that. Because otherwise it seems pretty out there to only look at a small subset of their commercial launches.
And I'm assuming they'll do more GTO launches once Starship + Superheavy is online.
It's a 6x difference in cost per kg.
Alphabet owns a reasonable chuck of spaceX, which is the easiest to way to gain exposure.
In a pre-IPO company, VCs and other investment groups consider unaccredited investors to be a liability, and they'll either give worse terms or no terms. If you're worth a million bucks the SEC considers you to be a grown-up and that you'll ask questions rather than being spoon-fed data that can help you protect your investment, which takes away a bunch of scenarios where you can litigate.
I worked at a company that turned out to have an unaccredited investor. I didn't hear the details but they had to 'fix it' before the VCs would move forward with discussions. (They still didn't get the money.)
GP's implication is that if you have a million bucks you can get (are?) accredited, which will give you access to private shares. I've heard this too, but I couldn't tell you the details.
FundersClub and AngelList are more executive-focussed sites, aren't they?
I would pay a 4x multiple to be able to dump my own money in here... sadly, I am not a billionaire, and have no access to this market.