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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Raising $500 Million in Funding [wsj.com]

Elon Musk’s rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is set to raise $500 million at a $30.5 billion valuation, in a bid to help get its internet-service business off the ground, according to people familiar with the fundraising.

The Hawthorne, Calif., company, known as SpaceX, is raising the capital from existing shareholders and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co., one of the people said. The Scottish money-management firm is one of the largest investors in another Musk-led company, Tesla [wsj.com] with about a 7.6% stake, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

SpaceX and the investors have agreed on the financing terms, but the money hasn’t been sent to the company yet, this person said. SpaceX could announce the deal by year-end.

SpaceX was last valued by investors at about $28 billion in a funding round in April. The investors are paying $186 per share for new stock in the latest funding round, this person said. That is up about 10% from the $169-per-share paid during the April fundraising, according to SpaceX data compiled by private-company analytics firm Lagniappe Labs.

Including this round, SpaceX has raised about $2.5 billion of equity funding, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Last month it raised $250 million [wsj.com] via its first high-yield loan sale.

[...] SpaceX investors are optimistic about the potential of Starlink, according to a person familiar with their thinking. SpaceX projects the constellation could balloon to more than 11,000 satellites. The largest current telecommunications constellation has 65 satellites.

However, as at Tesla, Mr. Musk has a history of missing projections at SpaceX. In early 2016 SpaceX projected that it would launch 44 rockets this year, according to internal documents [wsj.com] previously reported by The Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, the company was scheduled to launch its 21st rocket but minutes before scheduled liftoff it was scrubbed for technical reasons and rescheduled for Wednesday.

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