SpaceX has taken eleven billion dollars over 31 rounds of funding. Their chief innovation has been the willingness to run at a loss. Other companies would achieve the same results if they had the same spendthrift orientation.
You don't get 31 rounds of funding without a proven track record of success. The money is a consequence as well as a cause. And billions of dollars don't guarantee success. Sometimes it seems like the opposite...
Their revenue for 2023 was 8.7B. It's probably going to be close to that total of 11B. I think at this point they are basically profitable. Of course they are investing heavily in new money makers (like star ship). But I don't think they are low on cash at this point or in need of more investments.
Sounds like a good investment to me. Too bad it's a private company; I would have loved to buy some shares otherwise.
Other companies, like Boeing, are in fact spending lots of money as well on rockets. They just have less to show for it. Boeing has wasted many billions on a rocket that is basically not going to be very competitive given that SpaceX has cheaper ones.
Yearly revenue has no meaning without knowing the yearly operating cost. If their yearly operating cost is greater than yearly revenue, that's means they are still spending the funding dollars. What was their operating cost for 2023?
Yeah those articles are bogus, they are just guessing at operating expenses and also exclude cap-ex, which is a big miss when we don't know satellite lifetimes.
NASA has had bigger budgets. And they tried reusable rockets and failed. SpaceX has achieved that nations have failed at. Even after 10 years of the first landing. The engineering culture has something to do with it.
I love the old 'it only works because they get free money'. Because people just love to give away money to companies that go no-where.
If its so easy for companies to get billions of $ why don't other companies just do that?
BlueOrigin is currently losing 2 billion $ a year, and somehow all these people who gave money to SpaceX are not willing to give it to BlueOrigin. So Bezos has to pay if from his own pocket. Why is that you think?
The reality is SpaceX achieved fantastic results with they money people invested. Both in terms of technology and in terms of revenue growth and profit on operation. And then they presented new plans for expansions and achieved fantastic results again. Then they ask for more money again. And so on and so on.
If you build large infrastructure its gone require a lot of up front money. SpaceX really only start to raise major money when they started major infrastructure projects like Starship and Starlink.
Frankly, the its absolutely absurd that they only raised 11 billion $. For reference the SLS rocket alone is so far running at 22 billion $. The SLS/Orion together so far cost 55 billion $ and they will cost a lot more before they are done.
The fact that they raised 11 billion $, built cargo and crew space craft for ISS. Also build the most successful rocket family in history. Built the largest constellation of sats in history, plus ground stations, plus distributing millions of terminals. Built and design the best rocket engine in history. And also built the largest rocket in the world. Plus of course multiple launch sites. Plus a number of major factories to build all that stuff.
Your claim that every company could do this for 11 billion $ is frankly laughable for anybody that knows anything about the space industry.
