[rayiner]

That seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. SpaceX is more important than whatever issue you disagree with Musk about. After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering in the aughts, I switched to software because the practical alternatives were building missiles for Raytheon or going to GE and trying to figure out how to make gas turbines 1% more efficient. SpaceX jump-started a commercial aerospace industry that was utterly moribund as recently as when Hacker News started up.

[infinitewars]

Sorry to burst your bubble but SpaceX is Raytheon now. You should look at what they're doing with Starshield, SDA, Golden Dome, NRO, etc. The commercial stuff was small potato stepping stones made more palatable to engineers, but the pivot has already occured.

[rayiner]

To be clear, I have great respect for military work. I used to work at a defense contractor. But in terms of building a career, it's a heavily regulated industry with little room for growth. SpaceX is doing defense work, but it has not pivoted to being merely a defense contractor. SpaceX's valuation is triple that of Raytheon and Lockheed put together. The market expects it to continue pushing forward on commercial space.

[infinitewars]

No, the market does not expect Musk to be mining Mars or selling Moon motels...

It expects Musk's connection with JD Vance and SDI insiders will give them the bulk of the $2-$4 trillion GD contract.

[rayiner]

What’s your basis for saying that? It makes no sense. Even if Golden Dome was a trillion dollars, which it isn’t, that wouldn’t support a $1 trillion valuation. Defense contractors average around 10% profit. Raytheon got $24 billion in government contracts in 2023. Its revenue is about $90 billion, and its valuation is $277 billion.

Funding for Golden Dome was $24 billion in 2025 and 13 billion in 2026. Even if SpaceX got all that money, it wouldn’t move the needle on SpaceX’s valuation.

[xyzzyz]

Traditional defense contractors have low profit margin because of the cost plus pricing on the contracts. They literally are only allowed to charge the cost they incur plus some fixed profit percentage. As such, they have incentive to drive up the costs, so that their profit, while low percentage, is on high base.

SpaceX wouldn’t need to so that. Companies like Anduril already are trying to win contracts on fixed price model, and if they succeed, they’ll have much higher profit margins than Raytheon et al.

[rayiner]

The estimates that have Golden Dome at anything close to a trillion dollars are posited on the assumption that it will be much more expensive to build than the administration believes it will take. If it ends up as fixed price bids and costs less than people think, it will be well under $200 billion.

[infinitewars]

That's right.. and Golden Dome (which is definitely a mult-trillion dollar program if space based weapons are employed) has a bunch of convenient oligarch properties like built-in planned obsolescence with orbital decay that amplifies a launch monopoly.