Pre-IPO pedia | Elon Musk and his SpaceX

Elon Musk, an American serial entrepreneur, has always wanted to colonize Mars.

In 2012, Musk announced that in the next 15 to 20 years, 80,000 people on Earth may live a self-sufficient life on Mars, recuperate and reproduce on Mars. It's something that undoubtedly drives some engineering people and science fiction enthusiasts crazy.

Through Internet entrepreneurship, Musk became a billionaire at the age of 30, but he did not go on steadily. In 2002, he wanted to buy rockets in Russia while was mercilessly laughed at. On the plane home, he showed his plan to his companions and decided to build himself rockets.

In the same year, as the founder of PayPal, Muske stablished SpaceX.

Musk became CEO of Tesla in 2004. As for him, the sky is the biggest dream, and Tesla is just his dream fund.

SpaceX's achievements include the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit around Earth, the first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station.

It is also the first vertical take-off and vertical propulsive landing for an orbital rocket, the first reuse of an orbital rocket, and the first private company to send astronauts to orbit and to the International Space Station.

SpaceX has flown the Falcon 9 series of rockets over one hundred times.

Since August 2008, SpaceX has conducted a total of 17 rounds of financing. Before that, Elon Musk invested $100 million in SpaceX alone in March 2006.

Major investors include Bank of America, Google, Craft Ventures, NASA and Valor Equity Partners.

There is no accurate conclusion about SpaceX's valuation at present.

On December 30, 2021, SpaceX disclosed that it had received a round of investment of $337 million, and the company's actual valuation had exceeded $100 billion.

As early as October 2021, Adam Jonas, a Morgan Stanley analyst, said that SpaceX could be valued at $200 billion under the bull market assumption.

SpaceX is not yet listed, so there are no details about its financial situation. The Wall Street Journal disclosed SpaceX's financial situation from 2011 to 2015 in 2017.

SpaceX experienced significant growth in 2014, as NASA outsourced its near-Earth orbit business to SpaceX that year, and the company's total revenue reached $1 billion, representing 47% year-over-year growth. But in 2015, SpaceX suffered a significant operating loss due to the explosion of the Falcon 9 in June.

In 2015, SpaceX originally planned to launch 10 rockets successfully, and finally reduced them to 6. As a result, many SpaceX customers have turned to their competitors to launch satellites.

Such as two customers in 2016, the International Maritime Satellite Organization and the American Satellite Communication Company, which turned to France's Arianespace to launch their satellites.

The Wall Street Journal pointed out that after another explosion of Falcon 9 in September 2016, SpaceX's revenue may again be lower than previously expected: SpaceX's revenue in 2016 was expected to be $1.8 billion before the explosion, and its operating profit was $55 million, which may be difficult to meet after the explosion.

Because this estimate comes from the first half of 2016, when the plan was to launch 20 rockets in 2016, but the actual situation is that SpaceX launched only 8 rockets in 2016.

In 2018, there was an unconfirmed rumor that as of December 2017, SpaceX had successfully operated more than 40 commercial launches. In addition, nearly 40 operational orders have been signed and are waiting in line for launch.

Contracts worth more than $5 billion have been signed, revenue is expected to exceed $1.8 billion in 2017, and the company still has more than $1 billion in cash on its books and no debt.

On January 11, 2019, SpaceX announced that it would lay off 10% of its employees, which meant that about 577 employees would be laid off. The list of job cuts includes production managers, avionics technicians, mechanics, inventory specialists and propulsion technicians — raising questions about SpaceX's finances.

In October 2020, Morgan Stanley analysts established a new valuation model after considering the improvement of expected cash flow brought by technological advances such as satellite upgrades, inter-satellite links (JSL), lower terminal costs and higher terminal growth rates, and predicted that StarLink would be profitable around 2030.

The question of whether SpaceX will go public is often debated. Musk said in 2013 that the volatility of the company's stock price would distract employees and that Tesla and SolarCity had 'no choice' to go public.

But more recently, Musk has seemed optimistic about SpaceX's chances of going public. He has said once they can predict cash flow reasonably well, SpaceX's Starlink will IPO.Manyenthusiastic investersare looking forward to this.

What do you think of the technology madman, Musk and his persistent pursuit of space? Are you optimistic about the commercial value of SpaceX, a mysterious company?