Put another way, the US spent $250b~ (inflation adjusted) dollars on the shuttle program, and we get much more output from SpaceX than we did for Shuttle.
The launch number is irrelevant. Starlink is SpaceX's largest customer and that is a problem. The revenue from launches is not great. The xAI fantasies are unproven.
It was the same thing with Tesla. Everyone screaming when Tesla had. $20bn market cap how they were extremely over valued because their car sales revenue paled in comparison to the other car manufacturers and yet their market cap was in the same ballpark. It was such a joke and so obviously unprofessional / dishonest. The traditional automakers were all nearly insolvent (tens to hundreds of billions of debt) and had stagnant growth. At the time Tesla had no debt and was growing consistently ~70% a year. Anyone willing to actually analyze and see the truth and not just read headlines and repeat them could have seen it.
Multiple launch vehicles and crew vehicles exist now, and more are on their way.
Taking tech from TRL1 to TRL9 with 2.5million moving parts in it is vastly different from coming up with another TRL9 design.
In days of yore you'd look at the fundamentals like:
- ability of the firm to service its debt
- profitability ratios
- revenue growth
- total addressable market
- competition
- market dynamics
etc.
You'd also pore over their quarterly and annual regulatory findings and see what's in the MD&A sections, assess the competency of senior leadership, look at how they view themselves, etc.
Then you'd look at comparable firms, i.e. companies doing the same or materially-similar things. Some of those are "pure plays", i.e. companies selling exactly the same product/service (e.g. TSMC, UMC, GFS) and some are not pure (e.g. red bull sells energy drinks but it also has a bunch of other stuff like a formula 1 team).
You compare your target company's fundamentals to those of its comparables, see what prices those comps are trading at, look at discounted cash flows, and then you pull a semi-informed number more or less out of your ass for the target as a forecast, based on your analysis.
These days, though, valuations are more or less completely disconnected from fundamentals. This is why Warren Buffett-style value investing is commonly said to be dead in today's market.