That article claiming $8b profit is indeed mislabeling EBITDA as profit. EBITDA removes any recurring replenishment costs, the cost of building the satellite, launching the satellite, the user equipment manufacturing and returns, all ground infrastructure build and replacement, all employee stock compensation (not counted!), no advertising costs (and they've actually had to do a lot of that lately to scrounge customers that are remote enough that their network isn't too congested to serve), no taxes are counted (though they get out of that because they have no profit!). Not to mention payments servicing all their debt and Starship development.

*they actually use "Adjusted EBITDA" which is even more nonstandard and means they define the accounting however they want!

Audited financials would be released with the S-1. But it's very unlikely that they are not audited given the amount of money they have raised.

> Those aren't audited numbers, as far as I know

SpaceX has been audited for over a decade.

No related to this conversation, but I just started reading some books on finance and I actually know what most of those terms mean now! Lol

True. They're replacing legacy ISPs in areas where your choices are high latency geostationary satellite service, dialup, or DSL where the nearest DSLAM is far enough away that it may as well be dialup.

If anything they'll go for the lucrative customers that _need_ a signal to go faster through vacuum than through glass.

Maybe some decent revenue offering sat to cell for the traditional carriers.

It's not meant to replace terrestrial networks, it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover. Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower, and are not economically feasible in less populated areas. There are also many dead-zones in mountainous regions, since cell signals are blocked by mountains.

Starlink Mobile supplements this, it's simply cheaper for mobile providers to partner with them than do their own buildout. Currently only 5% of the earth's surface is covered by cellular signals. Starlink will push that up to 85+%, and is backward compatible with existing cellphones.

5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) is already part of the 5G standard. It's not a replacement for terrestrial carriers, it's an expansion that enables devices to be always connected and select the appropriate terrestrial vs satellite connection transparently. ~75% of the land mass on Earth has no cell coverage, ~90% if you include the oceans. It's the same transition in theory that we had from landlines to cell towers.

It doesn't not seem like anything approaching a lucrative business.

TAM: How big is the market for high speed internet that can pay $1200+/year and isn't already well-served by comcast/at&t/etc? And of course, this is all with finite spectrum too. So you can't serve the major cities.

No doubt there exist buyers. But rural Montana doesn't have that many households. Add that 5 year replacement cycle and Musk's Trump alignment that has Europe building their own for security reasons.

Personally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society.

We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust.

Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareholders is an increase in share price, effectively speculation rather than dividends as the method of returning value to shareholders. So we're incentivising companies to be constantly pushing their share price up (rather than paying decent dividends), which does bad things to both the company and the economy as a whole.

It's not how the system was intended to work and we find ourselves on a treadmill of constant growth that is killing everything good.

Starlink seems like a no-brainer at this late date, but I remember thinking "He'll never be able to make money from internet satellites. This has to be some kind of scam. Look what happened to Irridium."

Data centers in orbit certainly seem like a pipe dream, but SpaceX certainly has the technology it needs to put them there, and that's a huge competitive advantage (like it was for Starlink) if they do turn out to be feasible.

For many decades, the only way the commercial aviation business survived was carrying the mail.

thats the game though. Elon is selling a "slice of the future" and everyone starts having FOMO... the result is a P/E ratio of 300 or whatever crazy number. We will all agree that the company isn't worth that, but theres a bunch of people happy to buy meme stocks that will make a ton of money without the slightest idea of how to value stocks. Botton line an asset is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

Good Lord, another Elon hater. How can we get rid of these wankers and their propaganda on HN?