Elon Musk’s SpaceX is reportedly set to mount a Tender Offer this December. The plan is to sell existing shares at around $135 (€128m) each. The end result would be to value SpaceX at around $250 billion.
A Tender Offer, usually taken up by existing shareholders, means new shares are not issued. Therefore, the move is not an Initial Public Offering (IPO) which has in the past been much talked about and means the shares would not be listed on a public exchange.
Almost exactly two years ago Musk made it clear that an IPO was not on his agenda, at least not for SpaceX itself.
However, last week SpaceX’s president and COO Gwynne Shotwell (speaking at Baron Investment conference) on November 15 spoke optimistically about her company’s prospects. She said that SpaceX was planning for up to 400 launches over the next few years of its giant Starship. She told delegates that the satellite broadband market was “gigantic”, and that there was room for Starlink’s competitors including Eutelsat’s OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, Telesat of Canada’s Lightspeed and AST Space Mobile.
She added: “I would love to say […] SpaceX is going to serve all of them [in terms of rocket launches],” Shotwell told billionaire Ron Baron, but “there will be competition — I think there’s plenty of room in this industry, plenty of room for competition.”
She explained her thinking on Starship (which will make its sixth flight on November 19th): “Starship is really a replacement. It obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule. Now, we’re not shutting down Falcon, we are not shutting down Dragon — we’ll be flying that for six to eight more years,” she said.
“We just passed 400 [total] launches on Falcon and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” Shotwell said, adding that the SpaceX factory was turning out 60 Starlink satellites per week.
Shotwell told delegates that Starlink will be profitable this year, but that Starship would take the company to the next level, commenting: “We are going to make some money on Starlink this year. But ultimately I think Starship will be the thing that takes us over the top as one of the most valuable companies. We can’t even envision what Starship is going to do to humanity and human’s lives. That will be the most valuable part of SpaceX.”
