Alphabet holds approximately 551 million shares of SpaceX (trading under the ticker SPCX), valued at roughly $94.1 billion, which represents about a 4% to 6% stake in the company.

Alphabet is also the biggest holder of PlanetLabs at around 10%.

PlanetLabs is the company providing the satellite bus infrastructure to Google for this project.

It's a little crazy they haven't tried to sell it off yet. Maybe they don't want to trigger a bank rush or they're limited in their ability to do so?

They've got $400bn+ in annual revenues, with $50bn in free cash flow, and the ability to raise enormous piles of debt if they needed it.

They've not got a pressing need for the cash, so can afford to take a multi-decade view of SpaceX. If you look at other investors who take a view across that time horizon, you'll see some pension funds and huge trusts putting money into SpaceX for the same reason.

It's overpriced today on fundamentals, but in 50 years time, today's price will look cheap.

why would they sell? because of ridiculously large the valuation is? like, I guess at SpaceX's valuation there's tremendous downside and little upside (x2 growth is unlikely when it's a third of the tech sector)

I could also see some key decision-makers just being nerds that like space.

I don’t see how America or Google remain relevant unless SpaceX succeeds .

We must not allow a mineshaft gap.

This. China's copying SpaceX's homework and the public/private system towards that is operating so efficiently, if SpaceX lets off the gas, US is going to fall behind off the next long term gold rushes like asteroid mining, and said space datacenters.

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Huh?

They invested $900 million[1] in 2015, and it is worth $94.1 billion today. Why sell? They also likely have restrictions on selling post-IPO, but I don't think you can trigger a "bank run" on a stock anyway; the price will just keep adjusting as you sell/buy until it gets absurd.

A bank run happens when everyone tries to withdraw all their money at the same time and the bank runs out of cash. Not really possible in the stock market where companies literally can create/destroy shares and there is a whole secondary pricing layer to it.

1. https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/alphabets-spacex-be...

>They invested $900 million[1] in 2015, and it is worth $94.1 billion today. Why sell?

Didnt you answer your own question? Most would consider a 100x ROI more than sufficient for taking profits

$94.1B will barely buy you some RAM.

"A bank run happens when everyone tries to withdraw all their money at the same time and the bank runs out of cash. Not really possible in the stock market where companies literally can create/destroy shares and there is a whole secondary pricing layer to it." Sure, it's not possible for stocks to become insolvent in the same way, but if a large shareholder sells it could trigger a panic and greatly decrease the price.