SpaceflightMemes

It's pretty simple.

1 - SpaceX baaaarely made a profit in q1 2023, if they did better in q2, we don't know (yet).

2 - SpaceX main customer is Starlink, making up 62 of the 96 launches.

3 - launching a falcon 9 costs 67m (if you're a third party, but I'm assuming for the sake of this post this is a healthy pricepoint).

4 - Starlink has a 2.6m subscribers, which (if they have expensive subscriptions), can pay for 23 launches per year assuming zero other costs.

So, at the absolute minimum, Starlink bought 39 launches, totalling 2.6 billion, using investor capital. So at the very least, that's 2.6 billion dollars SpaceX burned and would have had to get elsewhere.

Note that those are minimum numbers. The real numbers are probably an order of magnitude higher, since Starlink also has to pay for terrestrial bandwidth for 2.6m people. It's far more likely every single one of those 62 Starlink launches is venture capital. And despite selling 62 launches to that way, SpaceX barely made a profit.

In other words, without this free cash, they would need to massive up their prices, probably somewhere to the level of Rocketlab, which does need make money.