You can't know anything for certain but most of every analysis corroborates what they themselves say - they're operating at a healthy (though thin) margin on rocket launches and printing money with Starlink.

The context of this of course is that they've sent the cost of rocket launches from ~$2 billion per launch during the Space Shuttle era, to $0.07 billion per launch today. And the goal of Starship is to chop another order of magnitude or two off that price. By contrast SLS (Boeing/NASA's "new" rocket) was estimated to end up costing around $4.1 billion per launch.

To be fair cost per launch was in that ballpark already ($$0.15-0.05) with Ariane, Atlas and Soyuz non-reusable vehicles. SpaceX maintains the cost just about to undercut the competition.

I think they maintain the price there. They'll want to drive the cost as low as possible, because price - cost = profit for them. A penny saved is a penny earned.

Does SpaceX have any investors other than Musk? I thought he bootstrapped it.

Musk owns 42% of SpaceX's total equity and 79% of the voting equity.

The non-Musk shareholders range from low-level SpaceX employees (equity compensation) through to Alphabet/Google, Fidelity, Founders Fund.

There are actually hundreds of investors. If you are ultra-wealthy, it isn't hard to invest in SpaceX. If you are the average person, they don't want to deal with you, the money you can bring to the table isn't worth the hassle–and the regulatory risk you represent is a lot higher

> Musk owns 42% of SpaceX's total equity and 79% of the voting equity.

How much of their balance sheet is debt vs equity?

Eg in theory you could have lots and lots of (debt) investors and still only a single shareholder.

> How much of their balance sheet is debt vs equity?

I believe it is almost all equity, not debt.

There is such a huge demand to invest in them, they are able to attract all the investment they need through equity. Given the choice between them, like most companies, they prefer equity over debt. Plus, they have other mechanisms to avoid excessive dilution of Elon Musk's voting control (non-voting stock, they give him more stock as equity compensation)

> Given the choice between them, like most companies, they prefer equity over debt.

What do you mean by 'most companies'? Many companies use debt on their balance sheet just fine, and even prefer it. Banks, famously, have to be restrained from making their balance sheet almost all debt.

Thanks, that's interesting!

The easiest way to get upside exposure in Starlink and wider spacex is to buy alphabet.

The economics very likely didn’t work. It’d be irresponsible for a launch company to model Starlink without a customer knocking on your door with a trailer full of dollars to sponsor the initial r&d and another bus of lawyers signing long term commitments. Vertical integration makes the business case much more appealing.

If they can keep raising money from investors, that seems proof enough to me that the economics must be good enough.

Ie investors would only put up with losing money (and keep putting up money), if they are fairly convinced that the long run looks pretty rosy.

Given that we know that SpaceX can tap enough capital, the uglier the present day cashflow, the rosier the future must look like (so that the investors still like them, which we know they do).

Most of their income comes from government subsidies and grants. So, it is rather funny to see the owner of the company running around the government and "cutting" costs.

SpaceX's total funding from government grants and subsidies is effectively $0. They do sell commercial services to the government and bid on competitive commercial contracts, but those are neither grants nor subsidies.

Ummm... you know the government granted them a bunch of money to go to the moon, right?

No, they didn't. The government wants to get to the Moon via the Artemis program (which will never go anywhere, but that's a different topic) and so NASA solicited proposals and bids for a 'human landing system' [1] for the Moon. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics all submitted bids and proposals. SpaceX won.

Amusingly enough Blue Origin then sued over losing, and also lost that. They were probably hoping for something similar to what happened with Commercial Crew (NASA's soliciting bids from companies to get astronauts to the ISS). There NASA also selected SpaceX, but Boeing whined to Congress and managed to get them to force NASA to not only also pick Boeing, but to pay Boeing's dramatically larger bid price.

SpaceX has since not only sent dozens of astronauts to the ISS without flaw, but is now also being scheduled to go rescue the two guinea pigs sent on Boeing hardware. They ended up stranded on the ISS for months after Boeing's craft was deemed too dangerous for them to return to Earth in.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_HLS

> so NASA solicited proposals and bids for a 'human landing system' [1] for the Moon. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics all submitted bids and proposals. SpaceX won.

To go to the moon ... in 2021 ... yet we just keep giving them more and more money.

They undercut every other launch provider. There's no way they're burning investor money to achieve that at the scale of their operations. This is all due to the cost savings of reusable F9. If they wanted to they could jack up their rates and still retain customers and still be the cheapest. There is no reason to believe they are unprofitable.