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by rayiner 91 days ago
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.
1 comments
infinitewars 91 days ago
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.

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rayiner 91 days ago
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.

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xyzzyz 91 days ago
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.

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rayiner 91 days ago
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.
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infinitewars 90 days ago
There are multiple estimates, including by Republican members of Congress and think-tanks that put it in the many trillions of dollars.
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infinitewars 91 days ago
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.
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rayiner 91 days ago
> which is definitely a mult-trillion dollar program

The program already exists and you can see how much has been allocated to it.

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infinitewars 91 days ago
Sure let's pretend the first year budget of the program represents its entire future.

Even still it is already 2.2% of the entire federal budget. Multiple estimates put the total Golden Dome cost in the $$ trillions.

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