15B in revenue is less than what AirPods sell in 6 months.
It's less revenue than Spotify.
It's nowhere near what should be necessary for a company to be "one one the most valuable companies in the world."
Elon knows this. He knows that the 1.5 T "valuation" is nonsense. The market for space launches is quite simply not that big. How many more Starlinks does the world need? What would you do if I gifted you a satellite?
The SpaceX valuation is predicted on hype for scientifically & economically illiterate ideas like "data centers in space."
Elon knows this. He knows that these indexing rules are the only way to keep the hype going and avoid a space-WeWork failed IPO.
Agree that 15b in revenue is not a lot. Finance has always been about future growth with majority of companies value well out into the future. And this company is growing at around 50% and has insane margins. They dominate their space with overwhelming majority of global launches. So a high multiple is justified imo
Yes, they have. The BLS actually tracks a number of different "unemployment" numbers, whose definition you see here [0].
The "official" unemployment number, the one now reported as 4.4%, basically only counts the "percent of people actively looking for work that can't find it, who have been looking for work for more that 15 weeks.
The number you are trying to capture is what the BLS calls "U-6". That number is defined as:
> total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.
In other words, anyone that would like more work but can't get it. I encourage you to read the entire definition and footnotes at the link I shared. It's very interesting!
Right now U-6 is at 8%. During the 2007 recession it peaked at about 17%. [1]
Thanks for bringing this up, and you're right that this is closer. I still think it's imperfect, because a gig economy worker who works 35+ hours per week would be considered "employed full time" (footnotes, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat36.htm) and as far as I know would not be included in the U-6.
The other key takeaway from the video is that carmakers are highly incentivized to sell SUVs because they're still classified as "non-passenger work vehicles", which have looser emission requirements making them cheaper to produce.
The bug in the law really seems to be that cars that really aren't intended as work vehicles are being treated like them.
This model is the basis of the 1993 AASHTO guide on a flexible pavement design, which is not the state of the art, but is still commonly used. This is why pavement design is mostly controlled by commercial traffic. For estimation purposes, I would not even consider the load of passenger vehicles in a flexible, pavement design.
You are incorrectly assuming the Esclade isn't on 32+" tires with 285+mm width and the Wagoneer isn't on pizza cutters. Tire size has increased greatly on SUV and light trucks, which exerts less ground pressure.
It's not realistic to do this on a heavy truck, which run 110+ PSI on heavy wall tires and why they cause the power law damage to roads.
No way does the Escalade exert less ground pressure!
Firstly, a Wagoneer is never on pizza cutters. You can't put a 4500lb car on pizza cutters even in 1990! It came with 235/75R15 tires. They are big sidewall donuts, but no pizza cutters.
The Escalade runs 285/40R24 tires, that's wide and low-profile.
Widening a tire increases ground pressure, because low-profile tires have massive amount of reinforcement to prevent that wheel from cracking. This stiffness adds to the pressure the road feels.
Tire contact patch is a function of weight and tire pressure. A 205mm width tire has the same contact patch as a 285mm tire, given same weight and pressure. The only thing that changes is the shape of the contact patch, which becomes wide and short instead of narrow and long.
The 6000lb Escalade runs its 285/40R24's on 35 psi, the Wagoneer runs its 235's at 30 psi.
So assuming even weight distribution, the contact patch per tire is 6000lbs/4/35psi=42.8in^2 inches for the Escalade, and 4500lbs/4/30psi=37.5in^2. So the contact patch is only 14% larger on the Escalade, yet it carries 33% more weight!
If you look at the road wear formula, it's entirely a function of weight. So the width of the tires only impacts surface-level abrasion. And with the power law, that's still 3.16x of Wagoneer's wear (or 216% increase).
So the wider tires do virtually nothing to protect the road from the extra 1500 lbs weight.
In fact, the dynamic load when hitting potholes is greatly exacerbated by the 285/40R24 low profile tires, because instead of of absorbing the bumps within the tire, the stiff sidewall low-profile tires absorb way less.
The spring rate of the Wagoneer tires is ~1200-1500 lbs/in, the spring rate of the Escalade tires is ~2500-3500 lbs/in, so that's a 2x stiffer tire! As a result, it transmits twice as much force when hitting the same bump.
So as a result, an Escalade accelerates road cracking considerably worse than the Wagoneer, not even in the same league.
Yes, the heavy trucks wear the road outsizely, incomparably to the SUVs we are discussing. However, we have roads that do not allow trucks (parkways) or see little heavy truck traffic.
The tire spring rate is not what is "felt" by the road every bump, there is forward motion and coilover suspensions in modern cars running low profile tires versus solid axles and leafs on the Wagoneer, but yes nearly every modern vehicle ships on low profile tires unfortunately.
We are talking a few hundred pounds of weight difference per tire, it simply doesn't matter in the real world. I maintain private roads and even if your parkway is placarded everything is subjected to vocational vehicles and HDTs whether signed or not, because work needs to be done and local deliveries are exempt from transit restrictions.
The road wear model is obviously simplified versus the real world, the power law accurately enough extrapolates to HDT axle loads. You can drive a vehicle above snow, or move million pound super loads without causing excessive wear by thinking in additional dimension.
Keep this in mind next time some crank on Nextdoor dot com goes off about taxing bicycles. "Sure, as long as we're both paying according to the road wear and tear we cause".
- collect garbage more frequently in smaller trucks
taiwan has very cute small garbage trucks and they have a ice-cream-truck like song signalling for people to bring whatever trashbags they have out to the truck, so you don't even have piles of garbage outside for days waiting for the weekly truck. quite nice.
Having less garbage is a whole other issue. Small utility vehicles makes a lot of sense but doesn't seem to be the way it's done in NA. Maybe it’s a labour cost thing. But even the long haul trucks are huge here compared to the rest of the world. They haul the same amount but the cab and engine are enormous. Maybe because the roads are wider they can just make everything bigger.
I only need the garbage truck to do a run for me and a couple hundred others once a week. My Escalade is transporting me and maybe 1 other person on average 7 days a week.
SpaceX makes 16B in revenue per year, with 7B in ebitda (which doesn't account for the cost of rockets)... so assume what, 3B in free cash flow per year? And that's being generous.
That's about what Google creates in free cash every 2 weeks.
1. They've been in Growth mode, where it's common for companies to prioritize capturing the market over being profitable.
2. They've had no problems with money since proving their effectiveness. They can raise capital at favorable valuations (and hold secondary sales) whenever they want. It has been one of the hottest private stocks that people clamor to own.
3. As a private company whose dominant shareholder is the CEO, nobody can pressure them to raise prices. This typically changes after an IPO.
4. Previous government administrations would likely have resisted paying them much more than they charge the private sector or other governments. The new administration has proven they will do favors for companies that are friendly to them.
5. For awhile it seemed they might soon have viable competition for manned space flight (e.g. Starliner) but only in 2024 did we see how bad those are.
6. The low cost is a point of pride for Musk who liked to prove how much more efficiently he could do spaceflight than NASA.
Because if SpaceX were valued like a normal company, they would lose their money.
SpaceX, as technologically awesome as it is, simply cannot be that big of a company because the market for space launches is relatively small.
SpaceX is targeting an IPO at a valuation 500x earnings. They need to jump on the "AI" / datacenter bandwagon to even hope to sell that kind of valuation.
The whole "datacenters in space" thing is an answer to the question "what could require 1000x the satellite launches that we have now?"
It has nothing to do with what makes sense economically for datacenters!
Radiator size scales linearly with power but, crucially, coolant power, pumps, etc do not.
Imagine the capillary/friction losses, the force required, and the energy use(!) required to pump ammonia through a football-field sized radiator panel.
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