When valuing a stock, it is hard enough to work out how many sports cars, aeroplanes or pairs of jeans the world will want years from now. But how about estimating the cash flows from putting a million humans on Mars?
在对一只股票进行估值时，预测未来几年世界需要多少跑车、飞机或牛仔裤就已经够难了。那么，如何估算将100万人送上火星所带来的现金流呢？
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which filed for an initial public offering on Wednesday, presents investors with that puzzle. Its finances today are of no use in working out what the company is worth. At the valuation of $1.75tn previously reported by the FT, SpaceX would be the US stock market’s seventh-biggest company; but ranked by its revenue of $19bn a year, it would be 200th, on a par with Lucky Charms cereal maker General Mills.
埃隆•马斯克(Elon Musk)的SpaceX——周三提交了首次公开发行(IPO)申请——就给投资者带来这样的难题。该公司目前的财务状况对于评估其价值几乎毫无用处。按照英国《金融时报》此前报道的1.75万亿美元的估值，SpaceX将是美国第七大上市公司；但如果按其190亿美元的年度营收，它只能排在第200位，与生产“幸运符”(Lucky Charms)麦片的通用磨坊(General Mills)不相上下。
Investors must therefore make assumptions about a business whose mission is to “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”. SpaceX’s three parts are its satellite communications business Starlink, which makes up most of the group’s revenue and is already profitable; a space division, which is small and lossmaking; and an even more lossmaking AI segment, which includes social network X and some enormous data centres.
因此，对这家以“将意识之光延伸至星辰”为使命的公司，投资者必须做出种种假设。SpaceX有三块业务：卫星通信业务星链(Starlink)，这块业务目前为集团贡献大部分营收，并且已经实现盈利；规模较小且亏损的航天部门；以及亏损更为严重的AI业务，其中包括社交网络X和一些庞大的数据中心。