SpaceX did not make public statements on fresh financing of $850 million last week as reported by CNBC but submitted a file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The funding of SpaceX was reported to be worth approximately $74 billion, with a value per share set at just under $420.
According to Bloomberg, Sequoia, an investment firm, led the significant increase and has now contributed more than $600 million to the Elon Musk-led space company as part of its entire 2020 round. The CNBC report also noted that an additional $ 750 million in the capital for the company has been generated through secondary sales of the existing shares, making the total $1.6 trillion available to SpaceX, not too far from the $2 billion raised by the company at an estimation of $46 trillion in August last year.
This seems like a lot of money to be raised in a year’s time. But few firms, private or otherwise, have SpaceX’s capital requirements. While it was able to build a prosperous launching business with the money raised in the first part of its now almost two decades existence, the rate at which it undertook large new projects with considerable upfront costs did not slow down.
SpaceX is now designing increasingly new designs of the Starship, a reusable rocket of the next generation, with its latest Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 payload nose cone cargo capability multiplying. It has flown multiple prototypes – and has lost two due to missing landings. The organization usually is under continuous development of at least two new designs and has been working at this pace for many months now with an extremely manual manufacturing process for rockets and new powered engines.
In the meantime, Starlink, the national broadband satellite constellation, is now being established and is aiming to extend from its present 1,000+ to more than 12,000 for final worldwide coverage. SpaceX has launched its own dedicated Falcon 9 rockets, each with 60 Starlink satellites, to easily scale them up and make its operation available (now for select regions in North America). As the organization is its own client for most of these operations, it is totally operational. Musk reports that Starlink’s complete launch takes around $10 billion.
