Last time I checked the important metric in business is revenue - cost of goods sold
If they are approximately the same you are just running a big operation, not a profitable business. And I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, being at the helm of a big operation feels great and gives the master of the ship a lot of meaning, but it's not a profitable enterprise.
Even SaaS, bio-tech and platforms feel the pain and the anxiety every minute they spend without being profitable.
Despite what the CEOs say, it's like being underwater, you can be optimistic about your ability to swim towards the surface, but still you got to get there.
You need both revenue growing and costs staying flat or just slightly increasing
Only the SaaS, biotech and platforms get a free pass, because the rationale is that once you become the dominant player , drive everybody out of business and kill competitors in the cradle thanks to your strategy aimed at acquiring marketshare...you'd then be able to sweep the market because you'd found yourself in a monopoly or quasi-monopoly regime, thanks to the network effects and a huge first mover advantage.
No matter what Musk says : cars and rockets aren't tech-platforms.
Of course you can bet on his ability to convince people other than yourself that they are, but that is a social engineering bet, on the charisma and the salesman ability of mr. Musk, it's not an enterprise or a business bet.
Nothing wrong with social engineering bets, they are the most profitable ones and you can ride on the way up and all the way down, like Thiel and Robert Mercer did with Trump for example.
It's not like they believed he'd Make America Great Again, they believed he could convince people other than themselves that he'd do so.
Reading other people's minds is not yet possible :( , for everything else there's AQR, RenTech and D.E. Shaw.
What is the global spend on space launches annually? $5 billion maybe? And not growing very quickly, if at all. And most of that market is inaccessible because many of the biggest space agencies prefer to keep things in-house, even if it means a worse product at a higher cost.
Revenue is projected to be 3 billion this year, projected to be 10 billion by 2025. You also get Starlink with it, which is valued at 10 billion by itself.
At 10x revenue, it is valued similar to Facebook, Microsoft and Google.