SpaceX has hints of monopoly, has shown consistent innovation, and has an ambitious long term vision. Boeing lacks all of the above, so it's apples and oranges
Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.
Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.
Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
> Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same
China and Blue Origin are Europe may be funding the research, but Arianespace ensures it's more than a decade away from matching today's Falcon Heavy.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
The thing is that you can't put a price tag on national security. For example Ukraine got F16s. Good plane. However after a spat between Zelensky a Trump, Ukrainian F16 got no new updates to their jammers, which temporarily degraded the plane performance and Ukrainians needed to pull them out of frontlines.
Sometimes it is just better to fly on a plane which is not the top performer, but which you can control and manufacture or which a neighbor with same geopolitical problems like you can control and manufacture - i.e. Swedish SAAB JAS39
Same with space launches. Furthermore SpaceX is US company, so US government will want to know everything about the payload, probably down to the schematics and software, which is a big no-no for national security, but even for IP protection - what is stopping US government to supplying your IP to your US competitor? Nothing.
Of course you can. It costs more, but a finite amount more.
Your argument is it'sz worth paying that cost. I agree. But those cases are limited, both by the customer base and that additional cost.
SpaceX is not launching non-U.S. national security payloads. That's not great for American power. But it's a rounding error for a launch provider putting mass in orbit over three times a week [1].
Reusable rockets aren't magic. There is a long distance between 'reusable' and reusing something many 100s of times to reach scale.
Blue Origin is losing billions every year, its not hobby of the richest person in the world, not true competitor. Remember rockets are small markets and everybody other then SpaceX is losing money.
Europe and China has literally 0 shot at breaking into the places SpaceX dominates. Europe will take another 10 years before they get a reusable rocket and even then, launching something like Starship wouldn't happen for another long time after that.
China simply can't compete in these markets by law, in the US. Them having reusable rockets doesn't matter for SpaceX. I don't think China will have Starlink competitor that can compete globally anytime soon. But that might be a real competitor eventually.
Kupiter is arguable a more real competitor.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years.
That's a gigantic, gigantic, huge and absurdly large assumption.
A lot would need to happen for all current US allies to block all SpaceX products.
Not to suggest that 61x multiple is justified, but your counter argument doesn't really work.
I think the better argument against the 61x multiple is that the overall market simply isn't big enough. SpaceX would have to break into many other markets and how to do that is difficult to say for a number of reasons.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies
I wouldn’t make business or investment decisions based on any assumptions about “alienation.” I was just in Tokyo for a week of meetings with various business professionals, and there was zero sign of any “alienation.” I was expecting to spend most of the time talking about tariffs and nobody even about them. Everyone instead was focused on the new Prime Minister’s faux pas commenting on the security of Taiwan.
Just one set of data points, of course, but consider whether this concept of alienation is real or a creation of US media.
I dunno, I've noticed quite a bit of hesitancy. Like they want to figure out "which kind" of American you are before they will even nudge the topic of US politics.
I have criticized Musk plenty and have been skeptical of the Starship timelines from the beginning, however, SpaceX has launched over 150 times this year. That's more than the entire rest of the world. Surely they must be doing something right?
> skeptical of the Starship timelines from the beginning
I would hope so, the Shotwell 2018 TED Talk put point to point flights for Starship for around the price of business class in commercial service by 2028, Musk said still on track a few years later after the move away from aspirated cooling, a bit later I think they made the move to aspirational timelines.
It made an impression on me when Musk invited the world's press to Texas and stood them in front of MK1, pointed at it and said it would go to space that year. It also made an impression when it and the next few fell apart on the ground.
After that I decided I wasn't going to count Musk's eggs before they are hatched. What has been accomplished with Starship so far is impressive, that should be acknowledged. But big todo items, heat shield, refueling and reusability are still to be proved and we'll have to wait and see if and when they are achieved.
The launching is routine, the landing and being able to turn around the same booster again in a few weeks is a capability no one else has. Their ability to launch so often came in handy over the past few years when other providers faltered. They were able to, on short notice, take over launches from Ariane 6, Vulcan, and Antares because of development delays and Soyuz because of political problems. No other medium launch provider can fit a launch in on short notice, they need years of lead time for one, let alone multiple. For SpaceX they just bump a Starlink payload a few months from now and replace it with the new one.
> all for their not as good as fiber internet
Starlink is making money. Its not just stealing market share from the incumbents but its significantly expanded the market.
It's not making money though, it's being propped up by fascist governments and VC's. It's laggy, more expensive internet that goes out w/ every solar flare, nobody I know even would think about using it for daily use and don't even lie to me and say you have a "friend" who loves it or that same old bs.
Like I said it's stolen customers from incumbents like Hughesnet and Viasat and expanded the market to customers who did not previously have satellite internet. They were able to do it because their low orbit service is significantly better than geostationary services.
They have made explicit from the beginning that they are not competing with wired internet service.
> The only thing they are consistent on is blowing up taxpayer bought rockets.
Weird. I must have been imagining the Falcon 9 launching more mass to orbit this year than the entirety of the rest of the planet. More than all the flights of the Space Shuttle program combined.
Starliner leaving astronauts stranded after first not making it to the space station.
737 MAX crashing and killing people due to slapped-together flight control integration.
737 MAX having windows blow out due to sheer manufacturing incompetence.
KC-46 deliveries being rejected due to literal tools being found in fuel tanks.
Boeing HAD an over 100 year history of delivering. You can build a thousand bridges. No one's calling you a bridgebuilder after you shag just one sheep.
My experience was less good. Starlink suffered from intermittent outages, and enough bitrate jitter to make video calling a distraction. Latency was good but still higher than advertised, and the average download speed felt noticeably slower than wired broadband. It wasn't uncommon to see 50% dropped packets while playing a game or watching live content, which is more than I saw with Hughesnet.
It's preferable to 3G or being stranded in the woods, but there are definitely points where I wondered if a 4G LTE hotspot would have been faster for home internet.
Is satellite internet advertised as being more capable than a 4G LTE hotspot?
From my understanding, physics would not allow that (for a decent, not oversubscribed 4G LTE mobile connection and backhaul). But those parameters exist for satellite internet, too.
I mean anecdotes aren't great for sweeping generalizations. When I'm taking vacation at my sister's ranch teams calls work just fine with my customers, so ones mileage may vary.
It's about growth potential. Boeing has all the excitement of a utility company, just with bigger publicity problems. SpaceX has the potential to forge whole new industries. If you're bullish on space tourism or asteroid mining, SpaceX is the best bet on the table right now.
> China's building two, so that advantage will be fleeting
Monopoly may be fleeting. Advantage, no.
Again, we're looking at a decade plus of SpaceX having a decided advantage in putting mass in orbit. That could mean more capability, more capacity, faster deployment of new technology or even more margin (since you can go cheap on station keeping).
Ah yes. One of them got $2.6B for six flights. The other one got $4.2B for six flights.
One of them flew six flights successfully, got contract extended further to 14 flights for a total of 4.93 billion. They also flew other paying customers seven times.
In that time, the second one flew once with astronauts, and had so many problems that they ended up coming home on the first guy's spacecraft.
> 800b valuation on 13b of revenue in 2024. That's a 61x multiple
From about $9bn in 2023. 40%+ growth yields a PRG ratio (modified PEG [1]) of about 1.5x.
Boeing managed to increase its revenue in 2025 about 10%, putting its similar ratio at around 0.2x. SpaceX trading around 7x where Boeing trades doesn't strike me, at first glance, as unreasonable.
The issue is that its not clear what other markets SpaceX can grow into. The rocket market is small. The government market for sats and the commercial market for sats is bigger but SpaceX already domiantes that.
Its not clear to me how much room there is for that kind of growth to continue.
They are the overwhelmingly dominate space company, but how much actual revenue growth can you get from that. Telecommunications is already the largest part of the sector, and SpaceX already the overwhelmingly dominate player.
At some point you need to break into something other then that to be able to continue to grow.
Or maybe my assumption about that is wrong, and combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative.
> its not clear what other markets SpaceX can grow into. The rocket market is small
Ten years ago, smart people said the launch market couldn't possibly grow beyond $3 to 5bn.
There is a tonnne of induced demand when it comes to launch. In LEO alone we have telecommunications, sensing and defence applications, most of which don't do well when put on the same bird. Add to that potential power-transmission uses and a global race to the Moon and Mars and it seems even if Starship can be mass manufactured, production will be the limiter, not demand.
> combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative
Doubtful for broadband. Probable for rural and maybe even suburban cellular.
Ten years ago i already knew that SpaceX was able to build spacecraft, see Dragon. And I already new telecommunications was a big field. That SpaceX would try to expand in sat manufacture was clear and their advantage obvious.
Telecommunications is overwhelmingly the largest space sector, it was in the 90s and is today. Sensing has been around for 60+ years and has grown fast both military and civilian, Planet and co. But its small compared to Telecommunication. And in order to rival that you would need many, many more years of incredibly fast growth.
As for defense application, the most absurd possible one would be Golden Dome. And granted that would be a big chucnk of money if SpaceX can get a huge piece. But I don't think Goldon Dome will happen anytime soon or will be quite a big difference.
You are right that cellular will grow and that's a vector for continued growth of Starlink. So there is decently growth and a lot yet to do. SpaceX a growth company, but justifying 800b on that is a bit questionable. They would need to like 5x in revenue and continue to show massive growth.
As for general 'induced demand', maybe, but we have already seen some of that, and there is growth, but nowhere near the amount of growth for SpaceX to go from 100s to 1000s of launches. Specially with Starship.
There needs to be 3-5 other telecom sized sectors that are actually real. Defense MIGHT be 1.
I just don't see it. Tourism, space mining and space manufacturing would need to happen big time.
There is a lot of talk about 'data centers in space' but I think that is silly. Space solar is even worse.
I think Boeing is up largely for other reasons like entire defense sector going up, especially aerospace, after US aerial participation in the twelve-day Iran war.
I've long held a belief that if countries want to mandate compliance, they should be required to provide the mechanism for compliance.
Want to deem whether content is allowed or not? Fine, provide an API that allows content to be scanned and return a bool.
Want to age-gate content? Fine, provide an identity service.
While both of these will reduce privacy, they'll achieve one of two objectives: Either those making these policies will realize the law they wrote is impossible to achieve, or it will at least provide an even playing field for startups vs incumbents if they succeed.
There are simply no offline business models of user generated content, so this comparison doesn't hold at all. Whenever somebody comes up with such a offline business, we will see about it at that point.
Tell me in which case a place like a restaurant or a movie theater was found to be liable because a consumer suddenly decided to speak harmful speech or violating someone else privacy?...
Show me one place like a restaurant or a movie theater where I can put a poster in their shop window without them asking questions about the content of the poster.
Many countries fail to provide their citizens with digital identification while enforcing age limits and such, but at least most of Europe will have solutions for both of these soon. Plus, "complying with the law threatens my bottom line" has never been a reason to ignore the law anyway. If restaurants were run like internet companies, people would die of food poisoning every day because "it'd be too much of a burden to check if _every_ ingredient is in date before cooking".
This proves that the laws they write are actually quite possible to achieve. It'll happen at the cost of some freedom and many of the nice things about the internet in general, but if you're a businessman looking at business potential and don't care too much about artistic creativity, the impact is actually quite minimal. I'm glad UK and US companies are hiring the most incompetent and useless "verification" companies out there to punish the government through a weird form of malicious compliance, but that won't last.
> Want to deem whether content is allowed or not? Fine, provide an API that allows content to be scanned and return a bool.
These mechanisms not only exist, governments try their best to convince people to use them. I don't think you'll get away in court arguing that there is no accessible service for you to use. What happens when you fail after applying one of these services is up for debate, but so far, laws just want you to try your best to prevent abuse, and existing services are enough for that.
> Want to age-gate content? Fine, provide an identity service.
This is a problem now, but privacy-safe age verification is rolling out across the EU in the coming years. This is actually a super easy problem to solve when the government puts in the bare minimum amount of work. A decent argument against the UK/US/etc. but not so much so for an EU member state like in this court case.
For the reference implementation that will not actually be deployed as an official solution so far, yes. Although you could also go with an Apple account.
In fact, I don't think you technically need to be signed into a Google account for Play Verification to pass, though many phones do make completing the Google sign-in a requirement.
> For the reference implementation that will not actually be deployed as an official solution so far, yes
...or the IT-Wallet which is currently deployed, and who's developers stubbornly refuse to remove the requirement.
> In fact, I don't think you technically need to be signed into a Google account for Play Verification to pass
And you're wrong, Play Integrity checks that your phone's account really downloaded the app from the Play Store, and so requires a (signed-in) account.
> many phones do make completing the Google sign-in a requirement
I'm not aware of any such phone, although they sure make it seem like it's a requirement
> Although you could also go with an Apple account
With a cheap, and very open and privacy-respecting, iPhone
> If restaurants were run like internet companies, people would die of food poisoning every day because "it'd be too much of a burden to check if _every_ ingredient is in date before cooking".
The issue with this is internet companies are subject to the laws of all countries, whereas restaurants are subject to the laws they are located in. While someone at the scale of McDonalds may be able to handle laws at a worldwide scale, a small food truck cannot.
...of all countries involved, and the EU already offers a fairly comprehensive common legal framework for many related countries. But, why would that small food truck in Italy care about Mongolian laws? Or maybe I just misunderstood you, please correct me.
Please don't fulminate or post shallow dismissals on HN.
It's valid to argue that laws should be legible and reasonably straightforward to comply with, and to point out that society as a whole doesn't benefit if only already-dominant global megacorps can afford to comply with laws (or bear the cost of non-compliance).
Let's make the effort to discuss the topic in a curious, conversational way, rather than with this belligerent tone. The guidelines make it clear we're looking for a higher standard of discourse than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes really, we’re here for curious conversation, not sneers, swipes and shallow dismissals. The guidelines couldn’t be clearer about this, and most others in this subthread were able to discuss the topic curiously.
Please don't comment like this on HN. It's fair enough to express disagreement with the parent comment, and I've replied to them asking them to avoid fulminating and making shallow dismissals.
But this kind of reply is also in breach of the guidelines. Replying to a bad comment with an even worse one is how death-spirals happen, and that's exactly what we're trying to avoid on HN. We've had to ask you several times before to follow the guidelines. We have to ban accounts that keep ignoring our requests. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I can't fathom why this is even possible, let alone acceptable.
You could write an equally featured text chat client in a terminal (IRC style) - no video or file sharing of course - but do those things really need to consume the remaining 2.29 GB of RAM?
Surely video calls have a native capture method in Windows/macOS now where you can overlay the controls for fairly cheap resources, and file sharing only needs to consume RAM during the upload process.
What gives with these apps? Like seriously, is it the fact that they need to load a whole browser environment just to run 100mb of JS? If so, why bother shipping an app at all? Just encourage users to allow notifications in the browser for the site and be done with it. No apps to maintain, instant patching on refresh, where's the obvious downside I'm missing?
As someone who has launched something free on HN before, the resulting signups were around 1/3rd valid users doing cool things and checking things out, and 2/3rds nefarious users.
One thing I like about this, despite it meaning Bun will be funded, is Anthropic is a registered public benefit corporation. While this doesn't mean Anthropic cant fuck over the users of Bun, it at least puts in some roadblocks. The path of least-resistance here should be to improve Bun for users, not to monetize it to the point where it's no longer valuable.
From that, I got around 100 subscriptions, which to date has netted me $2,673.85. That's from a platform that was designed to payout most of the subscription cost, where I actively encouraged people not to subscribe, and has since become inactive.
A small investment in bots can very easily be worth the payout, especially for those in LCOL countries.
You forget that the vast majority of the web in the 2005 era was blogs hosted on wordpress by either service providers or shared hosting providers, neither of which dedicated significant attention to performance. Many of them were hitting quota limits, but many still were truly just going down because of the oversubscribed hardware they were running on. Even an independent server that was properly set up though could hit issues. I had a few of my posts get slashdotted at that time, and the spike was real. Apache hosting wordpress couldn't quite keep up with the spike - I had to use varnish to set up a reverse proxy cache to properly handle the influx.
Tangental observation - I've noticed Gemini 3 Pro's train of thought feels very unique. It has kind of an emotive personality to it, where it's surprised or excited by what it finds. It feels like a senior developer looking through legacy code and being like, "wtf is this??".
I'm curious if this was a deliberate effort on their part, and if they found in testing it provided better output. It's still behind other models clearly, but nonetheless it's fascinating.
Yeah it's COT is interesting, it was supposedly RL on evaluations and gets paranoid that it's being evaluated and in a simulation. I asked it to critique output from another LLM and told it my colleague produced it, in COT it kept writing "colleague" in quotes as if it didn't believe me which I found amusing
This is the correct approach in my opinion. Metadata should not be used to control rotation - there are just too many edge cases for where it can go wrong.
Boeing for comparison has a 2x multiple (65b rev with a 154b valuation).
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