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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Their market cap is currently 20X what Tesla's was when they IPOed, though. The biggest growth phase (in terms of percentages, likelihoods, risk) is behind them. What JPM is trying to do here, is really just extending the point where relatively normal people can buy their stock slightly downwards on the growth curve, slightly closer to the end of the hockey stick.

Sarbanes-Oxley and the whole accredited investor situation is really a big shame when it comes to having an even remotely level playing field for long-term speculative investments.

Except in very rare cases, where the public markets were the only option for getting enough capital fast, IPOs currently serve more as a dumping ground for companies that have finished most of their growth. Index funds that don't care much can take over from there. Okay, it's harder to get scammed, but you lose the ability to invest in the biggest growth companies along with that.

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> The biggest growth phase (in terms of percentages, likelihoods, risk) is behind them.

That sounds wrong to me, they haven't even tapped much into their potential yet. SpaceX is still proving that they are a reliable, viable alternative to government backed space access. To my feeling they are at 1-5% of their journey.

Their space launch business will fail hard if the launch market doesn't pick up soon - all their investor presentations and financial forecasts assume 50 launches a year, yet the reality so far this year is only ~5 actual paid launches from external customers.

For starlink, I could imagine 75% of the world banning it simply because the network is run by a foreign company. Governments want to keep infrastructure locally owned and controlled. North America is a tiny fraction of the service area, and the only big funding sources on offer are the US government for serving rural communities, and the US government for military use worldwide.

If both those fall through, starlink will fail. If starlink fails and the launch market doesn't pick up, SpaceX will fail.

Fail hard is a bit hyperbole :) A company this flexible will find ways.

They might do space tourism. A great enabler will be their Dear Moon mission:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DearMoon_project

I can't see how individual nations can ban Starlink. A small dish antenna will be indistinguishable from the rest of dish antennas:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-in...

>I can't see how individual nations can ban Starlink.

Tell me how Starlink will smuggle dishes in the country, and how will they customers pay the subscription?

You cannot effectively ban starlink. It is unbannable, even in the most oppressive regimes. Once you get your hands on a discrete dish, it’s over. World wide WiFi.

The most you can do is execute people who talk about it or try to educate people how to connect, but word gets out eventually...

Governments could simply introduce interference on the frequencies used, which would cost essentially nothing.

How technically feasible would it be to do this without interfering with other radio communication in that country? Are the frequencies very different?

Radio emissions can be tuned almost exactly by frequency; this is how tuning an AM/FM radio works. Most applications also have more-or-less exclusive access to their band. All of the regulation that the FCC does is mainly to prevent interference between users and fairly consider the needs of all lobbyists when allocating bands.

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