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by tjwebbnorfolk 5 days ago
An equity interest in a company is a perpetual claim on future profits. Equity IS securitized profits.

Google's purchase sends cash to to SpaceX, which they report as revenue, and which they earn a profit from.

1 comments

SpaceX cannot report Google’s investment as revenue on its balance sheet. Full stop. Equity investments are reported as shareholder equity. If you don’t believe me, read FASB ASC 605-606, ask your friendly neighborhood CPA—or, perhaps so you’ll earn a valuable lesson about confidently spreading bullshit about subjects in which you are clearly uneducated (or, at best, superficially educated), try it yourself in a public company and go to jail.

You don’t know what you’re talking about and are way out of your lane. Stop now. In fact, you should retract your parent comment and apologize to the community for leading them astray.

Did you even try to ask even ChatGPT or Claude about this first?

> Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for access to “approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components.”

That part is not equity - that's revenue for services rendered. But a commitment for nearly $1B/mo in revenue will likely increase SpaceX's share price, and Google owns some of those shares, so their holdings will increase in value.

Additionally:

> In Comments

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes, the appreciation will accrue to the investor, in this case, Google (and every other shareholder). But it is not revenue for SpaceX, which is the error OP made.

I’m aware of the guidelines. Another guideline should be “check yourself for accuracy before you reach for the keyboard”—especially since it’s easier than ever. Giving false information that, if practiced and not disclaimed, could land someone in jail is irresponsible.

But the OP very clearly did not write anything of that sort. Their claim was:

> This deal increases SpaceX's revenue by $11 billion per year.

And that is pretty obviously correct. This deal is Google is buying a service from SpaceX for $920M/month, not investing in SpaceX. And that is revenue for SpaceX. I don't know why you're so insistent it isn't.

The false—or at least highly questionable and unsubstantiated—claim is “Now with this incredible deal, SpaceX is now GAAP profitable under the existing rules” simply because Google bought $11B of compute from SpaceX. It depends on how much it costs SpaceX to provision and operate the compute, and it depends on what other expenses and revenues they have.

A quick peek at their S-1 filing shows a $5B annual loss last year. Unless SpaceX is selling compute to Google at a 50% margin (unlikely but possible), they’re not going to turn a profit because of this deal. Any profit that does result will be small.

Google’s equity investment and P/E multipliers are irrelevant and have no bearing on SpaceX’s profitability. It should also be noted that when there are no earnings (i.e. net profit), the P/E ratio is NaN. There are no “securitized profits” when there are no profits.

And I have no idea why the OP responded to my response about the math not making sense the way they did. I said “equity investments aren’t revenue”. The response strongly implied that they believed equity investments in a company are revenue. Perhaps I read that wrong, and if so, I owe OP an apology.

If there’s financial engineering going on with SpaceX, it’s not merely because they have customers who are also equity stakeholders in a company. This is as common as the day is long. The top level comment is just a red herring.

Oh, if that was your objection, why did you identify the issue as "But it is not revenue for SpaceX, which is the error OP made"?

> A quick peek at their S-1 filing shows a $5B annual loss last year. Unless SpaceX is selling compute to Google at a 50% margin (unlikely but possible), they’re not going to turn a profit because of this deal. Any profit that does result will be small.

The cost of AI data centers is almost entirely the capex (10% opex, 90% depreciation), so the costs aren't meaningfully affected by whether the DC is idle or operating at full load. They're renting their DCs to Anthropic and Google for a combined $25B/year. The loss of the AI division is about $2.5B/quarter. The math is pretty obvious.

> Google’s equity investment and P/E multipliers are irrelevant and have no bearing on SpaceX’s profitability.

Indeed. But the OP did not claim that either.