SpaceX sells shares at $97
December 14, 2023
By Chris Forrester
SpaceX, as expected, has sold ‘insider’ shares at $97 (€88.80) to existing and new shareholders. It means that SpaceX is now valued at around $180 billion.
The $97 achieved is a couple of dollars better than the rumoured $95 talked about over the past few weeks and indicates a strong demand for participation.
Investors would have been given some key information that’s not in the public domain but with (already) more than 90 routinely successful launches of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets this year, plus an apparently extremely buoyant demand for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband-by-satellite system, then investment could be considered safe and profitable.
Revenues for 2023 are expected to be about $9 billion (according to Bloomberg) and projected to rise to $15 billion in 2024.
There are also consistent rumours that founder Elon Musk is contemplating an IPO later next year for Starlink.
There’s also data from Cloudflare Radar’s 2023 ‘Year in Review’ report which includes findings on the year’s top internet trends, including how top streaming services are performing. The numbers suggests that global traffic from Starlink nearly tripled in 2023. For example, after initiating service in Brazil in mid-2022, Starlink traffic from that country was up over 17x in 2023.
“Globally,” says Cloudfare, “we saw Starlink traffic more than triple this year. In the US, traffic from Starlink was up over 2.5x, and grew over 17x in Brazil. In countries where Starlink turned up service in 2023, including Kenya, the Philippines, and Zambia, we saw traffic grow rapidly once the service became available.”
“[Starlink is] continuing to make their service available in more and more places, which will just drive more and more traffic onto their network,” commented David Belson, Cloudflare’s head of data insight.