SpaceX is now a $ 46 billion ‘unicorn’

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The company recently completed a $ 1.9 billion fundraising round, one of the largest fundraisers from a private company, according to public documents and data aggregated by the capital data company. – Crunchbase risk. This brings SpaceX’s overall valuation to $ 46 billion. The news was first reported by Reuters.
SpaceX now ranks third on a list of so-called “unicorns,” which are private startups with valuations exceeding $ 1 billion, according to data from venture capital analysis firm CB Insights. The only two startups rated higher than SpaceX are two Chinese tech giants: ridesharing company Didi Chuxing and parent company TikTok ByteDance.
The valuation of private companies is a matter of guesswork, as they are usually not required to publicly share their financial information and companies negotiate new investments behind closed doors. SpaceX does not make its financial data available to the public. Wall Street has recently turned an increasingly skeptical eye on “unicorns” which rise in value while they are private, only to collapse once they are listed on the stock exchange.

But even at SpaceX’s breathtaking valuation, some Wall Street analysts and investors say the company is still undervalued.

Morgan Stanley analysts, for example, wrote in a report last month that SpaceX could be worth up to $ 200 billion if its experimental satellite internet project, Starlink, worked as expected. Morgan Stanley said his low estimate of SpaceX’s value was around $ 50 billion.

And SpaceX’s other ventures – including launching astronauts and cargoes for NASA, building massive prototypes for a future rocket to Mars, and launching satellites for the U.S. military – all give investors plenty of reasons. to claim a chance to own a piece of SpaceX, according to Chad Anderson, SpaceX investor and CEO of investment firm Space Angels.

Anderson said Space Angels participated in the last round of funding, increasing its previous stake in the company, although he declined to say how much his company had invested.

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Anderson said that when SpaceX raises funds, there are usually more willing buyers than there are opportunities to invest, and this was borne out in this last round of funding. This makes existing investors happy, as it indicates that their stake in SpaceX will continue to increase in value.

But unless investors sell their stake to other venture capitalists, there aren’t many opportunities to make real money with a SpaceX investment just yet. Musk said he doesn’t plan to list SpaceX on the stock exchange any time soon. Although the chairman of the company, Gwynne Shotwell, said earlier this year that Starlink could one day be split up and made public as a separate company, which could provide investors with an attractive exit from their investment.

Anderson added that SpaceX is still not making a profit, but this is mainly because it is still spending large sums of money to invest in new branches of its business, including the Internet business Starlink and its prototypes of. Mars rocket, christened Starship. And that leaves some room for debate when it comes to whether SpaceX’s valuation is too high.

“I think there would probably be a two-way argument,” he said. “I think there are definitely a lot of haters or opponents of SpaceX.”

SpaceX has a lot to prove: its Starlink internet service, which is currently in beta testing, will need to prove affordable and reliable enough to attract a significant customer base. Its Starship Mars rocket will also have to prove that it can launch satellites and, perhaps, convoys of people at prices that make its development a worthwhile investment.

However, SpaceX has a habit of proving its detractors wrong, first by building the first commercial rocket to reach orbit, then developing reusable rocket technology, and more recently by safely launching two astronauts from NASA in space.

This is the case for why, Anderson says, it is not wise to bet against SpaceX.

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