This is very exciting. While Google might have strayed from their original "Don't be evil" mantra a little bit, I couldn't think of a better partner for SpaceX to work with on this. Not only does Google have the drive and deep pockets, they've got the incentive. If this works out as well as everyone is hoping, not only will it upset the internet industry, I can see this having benefits for the telco/cell carrier industry as well. With cheap, fast internet available worldwide, nobody is going to pay $30 for a 2GB cap on their mobile phones.
> While Google might have strayed from their original "Don't be evil" mantra a little bit
I don't know. I'm getting more and more the impression that Page is cut from the same cloth like Elon Musk. Both seem to be balls-to-the-walls visionaries who accept nothing less than the utmost limits of what's possible - and then aim a bit higher than that.
I'm starting to think that, for Page, "evil" means "anything less than the greatest possible good for the largest number of people, over a very long term".
This seems quite charitable in every way. I don't know if it's just that I'm an Elon fanboi but I don't see the comparison.
Sure, Page has accomplished quite a bit, but I find it hard to compare to Elon Musk's track record in founding multiple cutting-edge firms in several wildly different domains. Perhaps I assign too much to the production of physical goods and not enough to software but that is a bias I must admit.
I think GP is referring to a number of "moon shots" at Google that aren't (strictly) software like self-driving cars, drone delivery, and longevity treatments.
But the thing that makes it hard for some people to believe is not the long term vision, but the short term actions. Musk isn't really doing anything that people could call harmful. However, there are a lot of people who would disagree with that if you said the same thing about Google.
'Harmful' is a pretty strong word. No longer the underdog and dominating in business issues related to search maybe, but I have a hard time seeing how this cause harm in any tangible way. Do you have some examples of how a lot of people might find Google to be causing harm?
Google has been known to connect to wifi hotspots without permission using their mapping cars. Not only did they connect to people's wifi, they also took dumps of any unencrypted data they happened to find while they were connecting. They only got rid of the data after a lawsuit forced them to.
They had terrible privacy settings on Google Buzz, letting anyone you had any email conversations find out where you've checked in to.
They're the only mobile OS maker who will not put a proper update system in place, leaving millions of their users without patches. Google is unapologetic about this, even going as far to say 4.4.4 is out of support and users should upgrade to 5, even though most Android handsets are incapable of upgrading. Serious security flaws exist in older versions, and the systems will never be patched.
Let's talk about the anti-poaching agreement they had, hurting not only their staff, but all of IT in general.
Google is the only huge company I know of that still believes it is a startup that can get away with anything, including breaking the law. I have nothing against the people at Google, they do amazing things. But the company needs to learn the value of corporate responsibility sooner rather than later.
I dunno... The first thought that ran through my head was "Jeez, I hope they don't screw it up."
By which I mean that I hope that SpaceX's mission to lift the human race out of Earth's gravity well, colonise Mars and explore the galaxy doesn't end up playing second fiddle to some elaborate ploy designed to sell more online adverts.
SpaceX would drive the product and Google will be a great partner and investor. It is a good match. If Google drive the product, that would raise a lot of concerns across many governments - like EU - as if they didn't have enough problems already.
I find it fascinating that through the business lens, Google is competing with Facebook to sell more ads by going into low earth orbit. We didn't get flying cars like they promised in the Jetsons, but that sounds pretty futuristic.
This is a bit like claiming that Google is investing in radical medical technology because people will watch more ads over their newly extended lifespans.
While this is something Google earns most its money on, I don't think it's the sole reason for its actions, nor that it wants to stay in that business forever.
> "Selling ads" puts it harshly, but it's entirely what this is about.
By the same token, you're a machine that transforms food and oxygen into excrement and CO2. That puts it harshly, but it's entirely what this is about - if you judge things at that level.
What I mean is - selling ads is what keeps their "corporate metabolism" going, but the actual long-term goals of the founders might be (and, indeed, are) very different from that most basic of all levels.
I think Google has shown they're trying very hard to become a primary infrastructure host for any business in "The Cloud", getting more people online opens up new opportunities there too
When your trying to grow you either make the glass bigger or add more water. By providing more internet to people who don't already today, you're simply making the glass bigger, which means more ads can be served up.
No. WhatsApp is used by billions of people daily. SpaceX is a really good government contractor.
What % of AT&T's market cap ($175B) is its SMS business? What % of Lockheed Martin's market cap ($65B) is its space business? Think about the incumbents WhatsApp & SpaceX are trying to dislodge. Generally speaking the ones WhatsApp (now Facebook) are larger by market cap than the ones SpaceX is targeting. That reflects the fact that something everyone uses a little bit every day is generally worth more than something used by very few people, intensely.
> That reflects the fact that something everyone uses a little bit every day is generally worth more than something used by very few people, intensely.
Yup. Toilet paper is a massive industry, too, worth a lot of money.
Even if each one of them was paying the $1 annual fee, that's still less than a billion dollars in revenue.
Also, often valuations are based on the number of employees. SpaceX has 3,000 plus billions of dollars in capital equipment. Whatsapp had 55 I believe and basically zero dollars in capital equipment.
I think that there is more to this deal than "Google gets 10% for $1 billion". There is no way SpaceX is only worth $10 billion.
You've probably put your finger on exactly why Whatsapp is 2x SpaceX - 55 employees and zero capital equipment. Grow it by 10 and it all goes straight to the bottom line.
Valuations of small startups where the vast majority of staff have a high value to a buyer and can be locked into continued employed relatively cheaply are often valued based on the number of employees. How many of those 3,000 SpaceX staff would be of interest to the handful of companies that might have an interest in buying the company?
Further, that's of little relevance to a minority investor like Google, as they can't turn around and say "let's sell to Lockheed now", and staff moves.
In terms of capital equipment, you have to consider how quickly that equipment depreciates and who might be interested in it. Is there even a market for X billion in whatever equipment SpaceX owns? The purchase price is irrelevant.
I saw many people using this argument of the "small value but for many people". But I think we should take in account also the replaceability factor: the hundreds of millions of users of Whatsapp could switch at any time, with no effort and no loss, to any other messaging application. There's plenty of them. As for the actual revenues of Whatsapp, they're approximately 0.
Don't they need Whatsapp though to get messages from others that use it? The network effect is strong and it is unlikely someone can make an orders to magnitude improvement on messaging software the compels people to switch. Barring major missteps they can be reasonably sure to keep a hold on the market.
Hmm. I started messaging using ICQ, then probably Yahoo, then microsoft messenger, now it's Skype. The first three offered exactly the same service. The other day I tried to convince someone to contact me on Whatsapp but he has already Viber. The network effect doesn't seem to be that strong, and sudden, catastrophic network switches happen all the time.
Right, so glad that everyone is still on AIM, ICQ, or even, BBM. They had huge networks, and barely anyone uses them now. This market has proven multiple times that users will switch and it will happen suddenly.n especially if whatsapp tries too hard to monetize them.
You couldn't possibly compare Gmail or Facebook with Whatsapp.
For many people, their Gmail id is their sole or primary id on the internet, used to identify them to scores of websites. It is their official online point of contact for various aspects of their online lives including their career, banking, social networking etc.
Facebook is their online social profile, which they spent thousands of hours curating.
Your Whatsapp id is merely your Phone no., (which was Whatsapp's main selling point). All interactions in Whatsapp are ephemeral in nature - Most people delete their conversations when their phone memory gets full. Compared to gmail and facebook, the switching costs are practically zero.
That's almost what he did—he was one of the founders of Paypal. Not exactly a "social" app, but he definitely used his fortunes from something more mundane to fund his more daring ventures.
I think social apps are harder than crazy ambitious ideas. It's easier to see how one would work on them, that's for sure. But precisely for that reason we see many many social apps. But few are trying to build spacex or similar, so it's easier to make progress along the axis of figuring out ways to create value.
No one knows what the demand curve for space looks like. Those who feel SpaceX is crazily undervalued implicitly assume two things: A steep demand curve* and that SpaceX will continue to drive down prices by large amounts.
*This is equivalent to: There are tons of people who think space is cool or useful and do nothing because it's too expensive and that won't be true with SpaceX's costs in 10 years.
Unlikely. Employees could be gone in <whatever their notice period is>, so you can't put that much accounting value on them. Factories are worth something, sure, but they're pretty much a commodity; if they were destroyed in an earthquake or something SpaceX would just rebuild them. Most of the value of SpaceX's assets will be in the designs (particularly the engine/turbopump design), not even the design itself so much as the fact that it's been validated and proven (and is cheap to produce). That and, perhaps even more important, having an organization that's proven its ability to solve rocketry problems and continue to make improvements.
My understanding from listening to Musk's announcements since SpaceX was relatively a new company was that the real differentiater cost-wise for the Falcon 9 merlin engine is the manufacturing process, not the rocket itsself.
I seem to remember Elon saying this himself in a relatively recent announcement. I believe it was the one where they unveiled the human pod thingy to go ontop of the falcon, but could be wrong. Either way, they use modern design and manufacturing methods, where the competitors like ULA use methods developed in the 70s and refined slightly in the 80s.
> I also think about their 3,000 employees and billions(?) of dollars of capital equipment would be worth a lot?
The capital equipment probably is largely pretty specialized to not only the market they are in but their approach to it, and may not be that marketable on its own.
And, despite the name "human resources", regular employees aren't property, and their attachment to SpaceX may be fairly tenuous, particularly in the event of a change in management and operational style.
Sorry, but how in the world will WhatsApp dislodge AT&T? The ONLY way it could do so is if FB and Musk/Google create the space-based inet access for the globe- then transition the entirety of the WhatsApp user-base to that system.
This isnt a bad idea actually - "if you want access to WhatsApp-X, then you must use Space-X inet service"
Stock valuations are based on what investors think the earning potential of a company is. While rocket companies are beyond cool it's a pretty difficult business in which to actually make money.
I think messaging apps are even more difficult, right? SpaceX has made around $4 billion on contracts so far which I would guess is more than whatsapp.
Whenever you have huge fixed capital costs and high per-unit costs your upside is limited. A 10x increase in the whatsapp user base doesn't increase costs much, while SpaceX probably couldn't deliver on a 2x increase in volume for a few years. That's just the handicap of a business that makes real things.
What investors are looking at is potential. The upside for heavy-industry SpaceX is far more constrained than that of a social media company.
A 10x increase in the user base of WhatsApp would make their user base every single human on Earth, give or take a couple hundred million. Probably not going to happen. And even with 1/10 of Earth as its user base, it was making <$1B/year.
I'd argue that the upside of making launches happen at 1/10 the traditional cost, with the potential for easy reusability with minimal refurbishment (which will allow much more than 2x launch volume, and a much greater cost reduction) is larger than WhatsApp's to a hilarious degree.
Yes, but they haven't made $4 billion in profits. That's "just" their revenue from the contracts. Compared to a software company, they have huge capex and huge operating costs.
Super-late reply but yes, agreed. I am wondering how much value they have in capital goods and land? Like if whatsapp goes bust, it's worth zero but SpaceX has some assets it could sell. And again, they have 3,000 employees, I would think buying heavily considers the size of the workforce they are acquiring.
Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp was probably primarily defensive. By that, I specifically mean, "They were worried that WhatsApp would cause them to lose revenue from their core business, and their valuation of WhatsApp was heavily based on avoiding that potential loss."
Not sure why you're being downvoted, that was my first thought as well. Sure, I understand the concept of defensive acquisitions, valuation as what people are willing to pay, per-user value, developing world markets, etc. But rockets are still rockets, and a messaging app is still a messaging app. I think it's the incredible disparity in total embodied energy for WhatsApp vs SpaceX that makes this intuitively hard to accept.
>But rockets are still rockets, and a messaging app is still a messaging app. I think it's the incredible disparity in total embodied energy for WhatsApp vs SpaceX that makes this intuitively hard to accept.
The hardest thing I ever did as an investor was let go of thinking there's some correlation between the things I like and market value.
One thing that needs to be considered is that SpaceX is operating in a space that has far higher risk for a (relatively) indeterminate reward right now. A single accident could severely damage the company's reputation and revenue stream, and I think their valuation might reflect this cautious approach to their business model.
I agree; though as a side point - after 3 failures in 2008 and that famous "optimism, pessimism, fuck that" quote, I want to believe it will take more than just a single accident to damage SpaceX's reputation.
You could replace spacex with whatsapp in that paragraph and it would still be true- more so even- the barrier to change with messaging apps is almost zero however everyone knows rockets are hard and no one expects a failure on the pad to destroy what is looking like a good launch track record.
If whatsapp start charging or introduce ads I can't see why people would stick around, considering the Huge number of whatsapp users who also have viber/snapchat/basis sms also installed
SpaceX has tremendous potential, but most of what will make them lots of money has yet to be proven--both technical and economic.
It's possible they'll never figure out launcher re-use, or get it working well enough to matter. It's possible they will and no one will care that space launch is now 10% what it was, and flight rates will stay the same, and they'll just end up dominating a relatively small and stable niche. It's possible the incumbents will quickly copy their techniques and push them aside. It's possible they'll fail in enough launches to drive off every customer and bankrupt the company.
I don't believe any of that, but it's possible and you have to take the uncertainty into consideration of value. Whatsapp has users and works and will continue to work. You know what you're getting there.
Yea but you could make arguments that whatsapp could suffer any number of ill-fated results. There's no business without risk. Technical risks are difficult but whatsapp has only shown that it can charge $1/year. $19 billion is a bet (and a risky one) that they will be able to squeeze more money out of those 700 million users.
Whatsapp was not bought only for its revenues or revenue potential, but also to protect against them turning around and using that userbase in a way that could turn into a threat to Facebook (whether themselves, or by selling to someone else).
WhatsApp could go MySpace overnight. Or I guess more accurately, go BBM. If they had a multi-day outage, how many users would they have on the other side?
The real answer was given by simonh elsewhere in this thread: the comparison is moot since they aren't publicly traded companies. The market is not saying that Whatsapp is worth double of Spacex.
I guess this is an old discussion, but WhatsApp seriously threatened the dominion of Facebook, a company that is valued at $209B simply for owning a significant amount of the daily attention span of consumers world-wide.
Essentially, the value of WhatsApp is based more on what it could have destroyed than on what it could have created. Advertising is kind of funny like that, since it's not a product that consumers actually want. No value is lost to consumers by switching to a platform without advertising, even though the economic damage to advertisers can be huge.
This is what I wondered too. I think there must be something we are missing. SpaceX has 3,000 employees and tons of capital equipment. They have contracts worth billions of dollars and loads of proprietary technology?
I thought they were already profitable? But is that incorrect? It would seem disingenuous to claim that they lowered the price of space travel by 90% if they actually weren't even breaking even? hahahha.
The investors also believe that their 10% stake is worth more than $1B. That's why they invested. Maybe SpaceX could have got more. But at this valuation they closed the deal and now have $1B to play with. Both parties happy.
The difference is straight forward - Facebook "owns" Whatsapp, and the deal was paid majorly through stock, if I remember correctly, vested over a period of time.
SpaceX still has it's independence and fresh infusion of $1billion in cash. It would probably fetch much more than $10 billion if it sold out now, but I doubt Musk would want to do that.
Had a similar realization when I caught up with my old boss at a big aerospace/engineering conglomerate. I looked it up and it had an $11 billion market cap. He (being in a smaller town) hadn't heard of Uber, which has ~$16 billion market cap.
And the company I work for, which employees about 45,000 people in 25 countries, mostly in factories building complex electronics, only has a $2b market cap.
The WhatsApp acquisition was an aberration. Zuckerberg was desperate and the WhatsApp founders knew it. Trying to rationally justify it is a bad idea that just leads to wrong conclusions. Nothing should be compared to it.
Our society would be unrecognisable without it. Most of the things we complain we could be doing instead of the space industry, we have good information on to complain about them due largely to the space industry.
I think that is true for our space industry in the 50's and 60's, but we've had a space station up there for years and what has come out of that? Im playing a bit of the devils advocate, but honestly all I hear is 'we are preparing for deeper space missions..."
And it is arguable that the science being done on the ISS doesnt have as massive of an impact on society when you compare it to what we gained with early space exploration. Just because it is called 'science' doesn't mean it's beneficial, there are plenty of useless scientific studies that are performed everyday around. For instance the 'Portable Glovebox (PGB)' that was on the ISS sounds like really amazing research being performed....
"The Portable Glovebox (PGB) was developed for the European Space Agency for use on the International Space Station (ISS); it can be transported around ISS and used in any laboratory module. The PGB confines accidental spillage of materials and helps prevent contamination of biological materials when the experiment containers are opened for observations, sampling, and fixations."
Yes. Figuring out design and use of lab equipment for microgravity conditions, as well as actually using it in further experiments, is definitely not beneficial for anything.
The specs on this thing are less than impressive and could easily have been developed on earth. (See my response to the other comment). Its a clean box with negative pressure.
Part of the experiment actually involves using this thing for microgravity experiments (also gaining knowledge about operations of space labs). Unless you have an antigrav generator handy or suggest science should be done in a vomit comet, I'd say it's important.
BTW. one of the important research done in orbit I recently learned about is figuring out how plants sense gravity. There were some cool results wrt. that, and this is the kind of research that is both important and hard to do on the surface.
My original argument was that the ROI is debatable in terms of how much we spend on space these days. Is it worth billions of dollars for the things we have talked about? Probably not in the grand scheme of things (Im not knocking space, or research just the fact that people bitch about how little we spend when it sort of makes sense to me).
Yes, but you have done the equivalent of walking into a lab and complaining that what they are doing isn't cutting edge enough, as you looked at an experiment and all it did was change a flame from yellow to blue, before it being pointed out that you were just looking at a bunsen burner.
Well, it was developed on earth. However, they have a 3d printer up there now, so you never know, the next one might not be.
Also, you seem to be confused as to the purpose of the glovebox. While there may be an experiment to test it, it is not an experiment, it is apparatus for experiments.
" The PGB provides two levels of containment; the first level being the enclosure itself (box, gloves, filter), the second level is realized through a negative pressure of 4 mbar inside the box." -- This is not ground breaking science.
The box isn't the science, it's a box for doing science in and a portable one was useful as their other glovebox is fixed to the wall. You might as well complain about research institutions for being made out of bricks.
I would much rather be an investor in whats app than spacex. It may be decades before spacex develops anything beyond the prototype level, whereas whats app can quickly scale and become the next Facebook or Google with a few years.
> whats app can quickly scale and become the next Facebook or Google with a few years.
Whatsapp got bought by Facebook, they will definitely not become the next Facebook and I sincerely doubt they'll ever become the next google. Try as I might, living without Google is hard, living without Facebook is stupidly easy.
Before anyone mentions that Satellites can only deliver inferior internet service, previous threads have taught us that with low earth orbit satellites latency is not a problem.
Plus, inferior/high-latency is fine if it's global. I'm guessing people won't generally be trying to play Call of Duty on these universal links, but rather getting essential services like wikipedia, email, etc.
The whole point of the original comment is that these are LEO satellites, rather than the geosynchronous satellites in use for previous internet service. These won't be traditional; they'll be about a thirtieth as far away.
There were mentions of both technologies and I was replying to devindotcom who was talking about how high latency satellites are still useful. Here's a link to that comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8920059
That is why I was careful to specify traditional satellite internet services. It appears the distinction was lost.
For geostationary orbit, yeah it's high latency. That's like >22k miles up. Low-earth orbit is a few hundred miles. The difference in latency is huge.
The highest cost is that you will lose sync with the satellite, since they will be rotating over the horizon frequently. If you can launch enough satellites, then you can have multiple in view at any given time and thus keep a continuous link.
That article is about satellite internet using geostationary satellites. Those satellites are as much as 200 times farther away than satellites in LEO.
22,236 miles up, opposed to LEO which starts at about 100 miles up.
That's because geostationary orbit is at 22,000 miles. These will be more like Irridium, which is at 485 miles. You can go lower, but it's more expensive because of extra fuel costs.
Down thread there are a lot of numbers thrown about, some slightly wrong or only in miles, so let me summarise them! The values are taken mostly from wikipedia, with some data double checked against [1]
Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
altitude: 160 to 2,000 kilometers (99 to 1,200 miles)
orbital period: ~88 to ~127 minutes
latency: 20 to 40 msecs
Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO)
altitude: 42,164 km (26,199 mi)
orbital period: 1 day (approximately 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds)
So if the orbital period is about an hour and a half to two hours, does that mean that you can expect to hold on to a single satellite's signal for about 40-50 minutes? Longer? I wonder how much power a cell phone will have to use to track a satellite that's moving through the sky - if the tracking will dominate power usage, or sending and receiving the signal will and we won't see much change.
I wonder how this will be different (if at all) from GEO satellites when it's cloudy. Could you presumably find a satellite near the horizon to use to bypass the clouds?
Much less - these satellites are low, so you're not going to have line-of-sight for anything near half the orbital period. Not sure about the precise numbers, but I know Iridium was really challenged by the requirement for clients to roam between satellites on the order of once a minute. As they demonstrated, though, it's a solvable problem.
But crappy sat network is better than no network. If I can build a log cabin 1000 miles from anywhere and access HN, or log into HN from my sailboat offshore, I will finally be able to never be productive from anywhere.
Yeah it should open out a whole new segment to consumer markets.
Free(but very slow) ad supported internet every where on earth.
Connection to the cloud for a million different kind of Internet-Of-Things class devices. I think this is pretty big as these devices consume very little data, but generally have issues getting connectively at all in some the more remote areas these things tend to get deployed. Think ocean current mappers, artic ice melting detectors, or a multitude of geo-sensors that would love to have a connection in extremely remote areas.
Satellite-based emergency beacon in every phone?
Slow but usable internet for remote villages. Pushing news, weather, education materials. Perhaps combined with solar power One Laptop Per Child class devices.
Free is subjective. They won't be free, but Google could subsidize stations and add ads.
IoT companies can create through own hardware and pay bulk rates.
Cellphone companies certainly have the option to get on the boat too, if the hardware necessary to communicate to satellites is small enough to go in a smart phone, as have the option to make an emergency call(or most likely SMS/Email) nearly anywhere in the world is a pretty killer feature.
Depends what market you're targeting. Google's "Project Loon" (data delivery from antennas stationed on high-altitude blimps) was explicitly targeted at third-world areas without much on-the-ground infrastructure.
Google must think Spacex is worth more than $10bn or they probably wouldn't invest in it. Right now SpaceX stock is not publicly traded so we have no idea how much it would be worth if it were priced to market.
A lot of people are comparing this to Whatsapp. But Whatsapp wasn't publicly traded either. All we can say is that Mark Zuckerberg thought Whatsapp was worth at least $20bn to him and 10% of Spacex is worth at least $1bn to Google. How much they might be worth to other people is unknown.
This sounds about right to me. If they're successful they'll be worth a lot more, but they're only a couple exploding rockets away from being worth nothing at all.
There is this fairly sparse press-release on the SpaceX website:
Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has raised a billion dollars in a
financing round with two new investors, Google and Fidelity.
They join existing investors Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson,
Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn. Google and Fidelity will collectively
own just under 10% of the company.
SpaceX designs, manufactures, and launches the world's most advanced
rockets and spacecraft. This funding will be used to support continued
innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite
manufacturing.
Think about it this way, if they truly are the first company to start laying claim to mineral deposits (or provide service to whatever govt does lay claim) on asteroids, satellites like the Moon, and other planets the amount of value in this company - even over the upcoming centuries - is going to be greater than the East India Company, General Electric, or Apple ever where.
Now that's an investment well worth leaving to our kids.
No, "laying claim" to mineral deposits not on Earth is valueless. Even if, in a rather fanciful world, said claim was in some way legally enforceable.
"Having technology able to recover said deposits and deliver them to an area of meaningful economic activity without costing several multiples of the value (or, more realistically, several thousand multiples of the value) of the minerals in question" would certainly justify a very high valuation for SpaceX. But they do not have such technology, and it is far from clear that they are on the path to having that technology anytime soon.
And nothing has much present value today based on its prospective value in centuries. In 100 years, we could be superintelligent nanotech swarms. Or extinct. Or anything in between. Only a fool would place much certainty on the value of a mineral deposit that far out.
I imagine it would be difficult for earth-based entities to enforce jurisdiction in far space. If you already have possession of an asteroid, it doesn't seem like there's much terrestrial governments could do shy of import tariffs. And whomever holds to material has one massive advantage in terms of MAD: they're sitting high up in the gravity well.
Certainly SpaceX has an air of "tool builders" about them -- they'll build the shovels and pick axes of the space economy. As evidenced by their current economic successes, they're banking on the evolution of the industry -- not a quantum leap 100 years hence.
A great (related) scifi novel: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein
That's the optimistic view, yes. But if they aren't truly the first company to start laying claim to mineral deposits? That's the nature of investment.
If I set up a company tomorrow claiming to have solved cold fusion, I'd argue it was beyond undervalued. Until I deliver on that promise an investment would remain a risk. Not that I wish to demean what SpaceX have done so far - it's fantastic. But rocket science is, well, rocket science. And a lot can go wrong.
SpaceX is all about getting into Earth orbit. It has no capacity or projects to go beyond there at present. Elon Musk has expressed a desire to do such things, but the company is not yet engaged with them. Doing so would likely involve fresh investment (for much larger amounts of money) and revaluation.
Earth orbit is hard in terms of energy costs, but relatively easy in other terms: you don't need to solve the long-term independent life support problem, manufacture things off-planet, or figure out how to do supply lines in space.
Solar orbit probes don't count - that's Earth orbit plus a small impulse and a battery. All the hard problems are in mining, manufacturing, and life support - the things the grandparent post was talking about.
Although in this instance, that probe is destined for L1, which is still in Earth orbit. (The Lagrange points are where you are simultaneously in orbit around two bodies - Earth and the sun, here)
Once, long ago, I thought Google would have bought Radio Shack and installed wireless network hubs in all ~5000 of them to bring internet to the masses. I guess this is a subsequent option.
That said, on the verge of bankruptcy, Radio Shack currently only has a Market Cap of 25MM.
