| ▲ | Eldodi 4 hours ago |
| Crazy this company will IPO for >1B with such bad financials! That said, Starlink seems to be a real cash machine, not as good as ads but enough to support AI bets. 2025: - Revenue: $18.7B, up from $14.0B in 2024 - Operating loss: -$2.6B - Net loss: -$4.9B - Adjusted EBITDA: $6.6B - Operating cash flow: $6.8B - Capex: $20.7B Segment breakdown: - Starlink / Connectivity: $11.4B revenue, $4.4B operating income, $7.2B adj. EBITDA - Space / launch: $4.1B revenue, -$657M operating loss - AI / xAI / X: $3.2B revenue, -$6.4B operating loss Starlink metrics: - Subscribers: 8.9M at end-2025, 10.3M by Mar 31 2026 - ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026 Balance sheet as of Mar 31 2026: - Cash: $15.9B - Marketable securities: $7.8B - Total assets: $102.1B - Total liabilities: $60.5B - Debt / finance leases: about $30.3B |
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| ▲ | runako 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The numbers overall are worse than I expected. I can't believe Serious People are talking about putting this in the market at a trilly. > Starlink seems to be a real cash machine It has been said more than once that Starlink financials cannot be analyzed apart from SpaceX financials. Very easy to move the launch costs from one entity to the other depending on whether it is more beneficial to show more revenue for SpaceX or more profit for Starlink. |
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| ▲ | amluto an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The use of EBITDA for Starlink is also interesting. For something like terrestrial fiber, I can imagine thinking that there’s a lot of depreciation on the books, but that most of the equipment keeps working after the depreciation period or is cheaper to replace than it was to buy, and that the right of ways and attachments don’t really depreciate. But Starlink satellites are actually gone at the end of their useful life. I have not dug into the filing to see how this really breaks down. | |
| ▲ | huevosabio an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The space launch operating loss is like 10% of the Starlink operating income. So Starlink is a cash cow! | |
| ▲ | aeternum an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Looks like it's gonna be closer to 2 trilly | | | |
| ▲ | Analemma_ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can't believe that my index funds are going to be looted to pay for this turd. | | |
| ▲ | thephyber 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | We can thank Nasdaq for lowering the standards to fast track SpaceX into an index with only having 5% float. Soon after it lists on the major indexes, we are gonna have some turbulence. |
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| ▲ | maipen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | As if any of the marketcaps actualy reflect a company's true value.
It's never just about financials. |
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| ▲ | jfengel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's kind of the whole point of a stock market. If you already had a solid revenue stream, you wouldn't need investment. These numbers would be kind of typical for a software play, since the great thing about software is that you write it once and then sell it many times. They're making a similar assertion for hardware: "fund rocket ship design, and sell it many times (i.e. lots of launches)". The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading. |
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| ▲ | kentm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The weird looking part to he is cramming xAI into it. It's a completely different business with little overlap that I can see, in a crowded market that they are far from leading. My personal theory is that Musk wants to roll up all his companies into a mega corporation that he fully controls, and this is part of the process. I expect Tesla and SpaceX to merge years down the line. Of course, the counter to this thesis is that he didn't roll in Neuralink or Boring Company. But its probably that these three companies + Tesla are the ones he's most passionate about. | |
| ▲ | yibg 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | These numbers would be ridiculous even for a software play. < 20B in revenue at almost 2T valuation? That's almost 100x revenue multiples at a not so great revenue growth rate. | |
| ▲ | electriclove 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There were talks in the past about spinning Starlink out. Perhaps the thinking that led them to keep Starlink in is the same thinking about their new data center business (what they got from xAI and will grow in orbit in the future) | |
| ▲ | stainablesteel 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | putting tesla robots on the moon ran by LLMs seems to be a pretty coherent overall plan, I don't think it's different |
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| ▲ | Rebelgecko 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Spacex has been playing fuckfuck games in recent months to boost their subscriber numbers. The day after I got my dish I got an email that the price of the base plan would double. They also sent residential subscribers "free" dishes, which a ton of people took them up on right before the price change |
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| ▲ | ACCount37 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm surprised launch is only -$0.65B, given just how much were they sinking into launch infrastructure and R&D for Starship. Guess Falcon 9 the old reliable is still printing cash in the meanwhile. |
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| ▲ | alopha 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Starlink is a cash machine because the costs are externalised to the rest of the company, all in it's a money pit. |
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| ▲ | abirch 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | SpaceX itself wouldn't be that bad, it's the xAI. It's going to burn through cash. I remember Josh Brown talking about Peleton after its IPO: "Great Product, Horrible Investment" |
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| ▲ | JeremyNT 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What is the best way to hedge against this turkey being included in my index funds? |
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| ▲ | porphyra 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's pretty much expected that a rapidly growing high tech company is gonna have a lot of losses and debt right? They're just spending huge amounts of money on capex. Not doing so would be like floating minerals in Starcraft: symptomatic of bad macro. |
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| ▲ | moralestapia 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Typo: I'm sure you meant >1T. >ARPU: $99/month in 2023, $81 in 2025, $66 in Q1 2026 Oof, are they already on diminishing returns phase? While I don't think the financials are bad, I agree, this is definitely not a 1T company (but the market can stay irrational ...). |
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| ▲ | tristanj 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Starlink is giving away the satellite dishes for free to grow customers. These dishes are expensive to manufacture and cost the company hundreds of dollars each. The estimated manufacturing cost of a Starlink standard dish is around $400. | | |
| ▲ | wmf 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That shouldn't be included in ARPU. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which is a fine thing to say, but CAC vs LTV (customer acquisition cost vs lifetime value of the customer) is the underlying equation. If it costs them $150 to give away a dish, but they get, say, $300 before the user churns, they still come out ahead. | | |
| ▲ | golem14 35 minutes ago | parent [-] | | By making a lot of antennae, they also lower their price in the future due to the learning curve. |
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| ▲ | boelboel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They've been upping the subscription prices recently past few months. | |
| ▲ | 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | jpkw 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Depreciation should be quite substantial - I recall reading that the starlink sats have a 5 year life expectancy? |
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| ▲ | Spartan-S63 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| If they cleaved off xAI and let it die, they'd be in much better shape! |
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| ▲ | electriclove 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Did you see that they are getting $15B/year from Anthropic because of what xAI built? | |
| ▲ | redox99 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | xAI is by far their most profitable segment, receiving 1.25B a month from Anthropic. | | |
| ▲ | lubos 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That 1.25B per month is not profit | | |
| ▲ | redox99 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Assuming renting their datacenters doesn't cost them any more than running them for themselves, and plugging 15B a year of revenue (which ignores X entirely and other forms of revenue) you get 5.4B income, more than Starlink 4.4B income (which is slightly subsidized by the launch segment) |
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