It seems that the IPO of Starlink isn‘t that far away anymore, probably happening in 2024. Would you invest in it?
I‘m a strong believer of index funds and never owned a single stock. But I‘m not sure if I would stick with that strategy if Starlink or SpaceX as a whole would be a tradable stock.
IPOs are great - for those who were able to get in before it, to dump the stock on the public.
Statistically they are a dud. (The good friend Ben Felix of course has a video/podcast on it 
)
You might want to play it as a casino, but don’t get in too deep.
No. I sympathise with most of the things SpaceX is doing, I really do, but I cannot have reasonable certainty that the stock is at a fair price today and future returns will beat VT. At IPO, too much is riding on hopes & dreams forecast into the future.
I don’t think I personally would have seen through past bubbles like the railway mania, I would have wanted to believe in a brilliant future driven by technology. The rational thing for me to do is to invest in a diversified portfolio, accept that I don’t know better than the market cap weighting and leave it alone. The only real screw to turn for me is in the asset allocation percentage.
Starlink be pulled out from spaceX and IPO separately??
Well I still have “IPO” ETF, but would like to sell it at some point when it will be overperforming VTI. I expect it to happen in the next bull run, when Fed starts to reduce rates. Probably Starlink will get there and maybe it will even drive the performance of IPO.
In general I decided to focus on leveraging instead of concentration, see another Ben Felix video about the leveraging.
this way SpaceX can stay a private company but raise some capital from the open market.
I’m not sure about Starlink, but I would not invest in SpaceX. This company has a very long-term goal and you as a shareholder probably won’t see much return for decades. It it also only meant to be profitable to fuel its mission (which is to colonize Mars). I think at this point pouring money into SpaceX can be seen as philanthropy with a small chance that one day this become the most important company in the World, but you might be retired by then
Anyway, I think we will be have been converted into paperclips before we establish a colony on Mars.
I see a lot of potential in both SpaceX and Starlink, as a private, more neutral alternative to government-funded space programs.
That said, I generally wouldn’t recommend buying into IPOs. It’s generally good to give the market some time to correct the price. Of course, there is always the chance of a post-IPO hype, if you want something for the just-for-fun/high-risk portion of your portfolio.
I think @Cortana is asking investing in Starlink, and you are commenting on “spacex minus starlink”, which is almost orthogonal to Starlink . Having said that, do you know any channel for me to invest in spacex ?
@Cortana Have you taken a look at AST SpaceMobile (ASTS)? One key difference between this company and Starlink is their approach to providing connectivity. While Starlink connects to high-output antennas, AST SpaceMobile aims to deliver broadband and cellular service directly to consumer smartphones from space. The company plans to roll out 4G and 5G networks for cell phones, as it believes that the idea of broadband will be more appealing than just being able to text and make calls from remote areas (as offered by Starlink).
Personally, I’m invested in ASTS with 2,000 shares at a $7 cost average and I plan to buy more after the expected dilution unless they get some funds. Only time will tell…
You were saying?
Nope, I only heard that it’s difficult. You can’t own it directly, you have to know a guy who knows a guy, and then you hold the stock through a 3rd party. Anyway, since they are private, you don’t have such transparency as with TSLA, so it’s hard to even begin at figuring out what the fair price may be.
yup. I agree that investing Spacex (or spacex minus startlink) is anyway not accessible. So it isn’t very meaningful to me in discussing that. Yet discussing whether or not investing starlink is quite meaningful and interesting.
Anyone knows anything more than just the tweet? For example some financial data? user scale? user experience? etc
They hit 1 million users by end of 2022 (after 2 years) and 5 months later now at 1.5 million users.
I just wonder how big SpaceX will be in the future. Maybe space will be the new internet and change everything about our economy and products we use. They might become the biggest company in the world.
wow. Do you mind providing the source? some link?
Personally, I would not put a franc in a company owned by Elon. I have no confidence in this character and note that the companies he owns have a high volatility on the market not because of their development or their innovations, but because of the virulence of the words of their CEO. In this sense, I see these companies as purely speculative as long as the management remains as it is.
Oh no, Elon tweeted a meme about testicles, next minute $100 billion of shareholder equity “evaporated” 
I like the product for certain scenarios but I would not invest in Starlink.
Given the costs of launching those satellites and that they need to be replaced after 5 years I don’t think they have a viable profitable business model in the long-run.
In densely populated and developed areas wired connections make more sense to distribute the bandwidth to the last hop (whether that’s a 5G cell tower or a some box in or close to your home). There it’s cheaper and more efficient and reliable/predictable. As you share the bandwidth of any given satellite with people nearby, the product really shines in areas with not a lot of people or if there’s simply no alternative (no wired connection available nearby). Arguably both categories are decreasing. But the bigger problem is that if Starlink has fewer people on any given satellite - it becomes less profitable for them.
If you live in a city and a lot of people nearby start using Starlink, the service will get worse for you. So based on what other options are available you might switch. Meanwhile the incentive for Starlink is to sign up as many people as possible.
Also, right now Starlink benefits from the rest of SpaceX because there’s a lot of venture capital and government grant money to burn through - I think they’re offering Starlink below cost yet it’s already quite expensive if we consider median incomes across the globe.
Fortunately, he did not own a Pharma company during the Covid period 
.
In any case, to come back to Starlink, I am not particularly convinced by the business model. The profitability seems to me difficult to reach without the service being offered to the customers at an astronomical price. I also think that there are other priorities in this world and in this sense I will not support this company (IMO).
In my opinion, Starlink is only for very remote areas (like the last valley of the Himalaya or polar regions).
Anywhere else mobile connections via 4G and 5G would be good enough. In third world countries, you often see that people mostly work with mobile connections (you have rarely the option for cabled connections as a private person since the strategy is mobile first) and it works just fine. I have been surprised how good mobile connectivity was in India (and how fucking cheap… less than 5 CHF for unlimited data and calls on a prepaid basis)
For industrial use, there is no way around cabled connections for reliability reasons (so glass fiber or DSL). Cost is not the determining factor, but reliability and service in case of down time. Mobile is not good enough because it has frequent down times in the night for updates, which is inacceptable for industrial use.
Finally, I am wondering what happens during a solar storm. Basically you have to shut down all the satellites and there will be still loss… It is not like you can easily send someone to repair it.
It is a niche offer for a special user case (really remote areas, emergency action, war time).
BTW for those who are wondering : 300 CHF for the hardware and 65 CHF/month. Could not find bandwith information
Personally, I believe that mass-production and reusable rockets could potentially bring the cost of satellite constellations well below that of maintaining terrestial telecom networks. In a tiny country like Switzerland with high consumer buying power, maintaining a telecom network is relatively easy. But it’s another story in regions which cover, say, 1 million square KM or more, and/or have harsher climates.
I also expect that mesh networks will become more common, and combining mesh networks with satellite Internet connections could potentially make terrestial telecom networks redundant.
One problem I foresee with Starlink is that it is based in the US, an therefore prone to US sanctions. As I see it, the biggest potential market for what Starlink currently offers is in developing countries. The emergence of a strong competitor based in a more neutral country could wipe out Starlink’s biggest potential market for immediate growth. But over the long term, the US and Europe may well move to satellite too. It’s a question of if/when bandwidth comes close to optical fiber, in my opinion. Companies which already have orbital networks will have a lead.
Won’t there always be some latency disadvantages as well? I’m also not sure laying some backbone fiber network + cellular is that expensive.
If a country is building roads/train tracks/etc. adding some fiber along with it is ~free.