WASHINGTON — While the Starlink constellation is becoming a moneymaker for SpaceX, the company’s president believes that the Starship launch system will have a bigger long-term impact.
In an on-stage interview at the 31st Annual Baron Investment Conference Nov. 15, Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer at SpaceX, said that Starship will “take us over the top” to become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
SpaceX is currently valued at $210 billion based on the pricing of recent tender offers of shares in secondary markets, although the Financial Times reported Nov. 15 that an upcoming tender offer at a higher share price would boost that valuation to more than $250 billion. The most valuable publicly traded company, chipmaker Nvidia, has a market capitalization of more than $3.4 trillion as of Nov. 15.
SpaceX’s current valuation is largely driven by Starlink, which now has more than four million subscribers. “We’re going to make some money on Starlink this year,” she said. “We’ve had quarters of making money on Starlink in the past.”
She declined to go into specifics about the finances of Starlink when asked. A report earlier this year by Quilty Analytics projected that Starlink would generate $6.6 billion in revenue for SpaceX in 2024 and $600 million in free cash flow even after accounting for the costs to build and launch the satellites.
“The company is incredibly valuable, I think, right now because of Starlink,” she said. “Starlink will add a zero, probably, at least as we continue to grow the Starlink system.”
That growth comes in many different markets, from residential broadband services to maritime and aviation connectivity. SpaceX will begin offering direct-to-device services “within the next month or so,” she said, with an initial version for “very light data” and text messaging.
However, she argued that Starship will be even more valuable to SpaceX in the long run. “Ultimately, I think Starship will be the thing that takes us over the top as one of the most valuable companies. We can’t even envision what Starship is going to do to humanity and humans’ lives, and I think that will be the most valuable part of SpaceX.”
That is based on the belief, she said, that the fully reusable rocket with a payload capacity to low Earth orbit that could exceed 100 metric tons, will “change everything” about spaceflight, and not just with lower launch costs. “Starship is so big that the concept of how we put things in space, how people will travel in space, is totally different.”
One example she offered was using Starship to launch a satellite. If that satellite was not working, she explained, the satellite could be brought back into Starship’s payload bay to either be repaired or returned to Earth.
“What we’re doing, with the work that we’re doing, is to allow ordinary people to go to space,” she said.
She predicted that Starship will rapidly eclipse the company’s existing Falcon family of rockets, which has launched more than 400 times. “I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” she said. That will be in parallel with Falcon 9, but she suggested that vehicle could be retired, along with the Dragon spacecraft used for crew and cargo missions, in as little as six to eight years as customers move to Starship.
Ron Baron, founder and chief executive of Baron Capital who participated in the interview with Shotwell, appeared convinced of SpaceX’s growth potential with both Starship and Starlink. He said his firm has made “seven times our money” since it started investing in SpaceX in 2017. “We think we’re going to triple our money again over the next five years and then we think, in the 2030s, we could make five times again.”
SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, he added, “believes that our goals are very conservative to his goals.”
