You're irrational. They had $13B revenue in 2024, and profit > $4B, with the profit of the previous two years covering ~60% of their total accumulated funding to date.
Well now you're just quibbling about the amount; it seems you do agree that SpaceX can be valued. You just don't agree with the <1 multiple the GP suggested. So ok, how about a 4x multiple? 8x? Whatever! Private companies can be valued; it's done every day. SpaceX is not an exception here.
Musk can say he's going to colonize Mars or mine asteroids, but the markets are perfectly capable of deciding on how likely (or unlikely) it is that he'll succeed, and price accordingly.
Colonizing Mars is a money-loser. It could completely tank the company. What business model involves colonizing Mars and then making a profit off that?
Mining asteroids is something we're so far away from that it's not worth baking in at that point. With current technology, it's far, far, far cheaper just to mine on Earth, even for things that are relatively rare.
> Well now you're just quibbling about the amount;
Of course, the question was about how to estimate the amount. It's a nonsensical answer that doesn't attempt to answer or help answer the question. If they were funded $1, their answer would still be correct: non zero multiple of a non-zero number (their last round of funding). It's an answer with unreasonable bounds, on both ends, especially the lower (fraction of last round of funding, even though current revenue is an order of magnitude more). It also has no precedence. The value of a company is never estimated based on rounds of funding from years ago (last was 2023 for SpaceX). It's based on both the present and projected performance.
It's not a rational answer, by definition, since it wasn't made with logic or reason.
You: You’re irrational. They made money last year.
What?
Do you think earning a profit makes your company uncountably valuable? Or earning a profit and adding some promises on top? Neither is true!
These aren’t real problems in any scenario and certainly not in the scenario of “hello the United States of America is seizing your company, here’s a check we think is fair.”
I responded to what you actually wrote in your previous comment:
> Some multiple on the last funding round (perhaps a multiple <1)
The irrational part is that it could possibly be a fraction of their last round of funding. Do you agree it would have to be a multiple much greater than 1, since their last round of funding (750 million) was a small fraction of their profit last year, and they are on the path of exceeding their total accumulated funding for all rounds in another two years?
I've never seen a profiting company valued based on their last round of funding rather than current/future revenue/profits. Do you have any examples of this, in the real world?
