Range is still a bit of an issue, even if you're just doing touch & go's at your local field. You need 1 hour endurance for the lesson, 15-30 minutes alternate fuel (in case you have to divert), and 15 minutes emergency fuel (normally 45 mins, but EASA issued a waiver for electric aircraft). In practice you want an aircraft with at least 2 hours "trip fuel" (the portion used for the planned flight), so that student pilots can complete the cross-country solo flight they are required to fly. Only now are we starting to see some electric aircraft that have the battery capacity for that.

Then there's the recharging. At the flight school I attended, the airplanes would typically go up 4 times on busy days, sometimes 5. With recharging, that drops to 2-3 flights a day (you're not draining the battery completely on each flight). But if operating costs for electric planes are significantly lower, perhaps having a few extra planes might turn out to be economical... but it does mean you can't pass that savings on to your students.

That one probably uses different battery technology. Same as the Alia aircraft by Beta Technologies, which is in use by the Royal Mail in the UK.
The point of using solid state batteries is that they store more energy per kg.

Rich people don't liquidate assets when they want to buy something.

They get a loan against their assets. At extremely good rates. And no, they never pay them back. The strategy is called "buy, borrow, die".

First, you need to understand that if the stock price goes up more than their (low) interest rate, they're still making money.

Second, the whole thing is rolled up only when the ultra-rich person dies. The assets are revalued to their current market price at the time of death, wiping out decades of built-in capital gains tax liability. The estate can then sell a portion of the tax-free assets to pay off the outstanding loans.

tl;dr: They don't liquidate assets, if they did they'd have to pay taxes.

The reason for that isn't socialism, though. It's incompetence and corruption. Politics attracts the most incompetent and the most corrupt of people, always has and always will. Basically: If you're shit at everything else, you can always try making a career of telling other people what to do.

In theory. In reality, that has always been bullshit. The various bubbles, crashes and other events prove that. Valuations on the stock market are based on expectations, and expectations always include an element that is not rational.

True, though both of these companies do have an actual business and actual assets. There's plenty of companies on the stock market whose entire business can just pack up and leave tomorrow. Many of those are extremely highly valued. All the middle-men companies (ride sharing, food delivery, etc.) all work on the principle of outsourcing EVERYTHING. They hold no actual assets and their entire business model can be copied in a lazy weekend. Each and every one of them survives due to brand recognition, habit and by being just a little bit better in some way than alternatives. All of which can disappear in a week.

Tesla and SpaceX are overvalued. But they have factories and a workforce and produce things.Their value is not entirely made up.

Lol. People keep repeating this without the slightest idea what it means.

Banks aren't dumb. The restrictions on a billionaire borrowing money are pretty much the same as the restrictions on you borrowing money. It seems like there are fewer restrictions because (1) they're borrowing much less relative to their assets than you are and (2) you probably have only a vague idea of the process based on people making shit up.

In fact, if you're like the majority of Americans and have ever had a car loan or mortgage, you've pulled off the weird trick of using the thing you're about to buy as collateral for the loan you're going to use to buy it. And if you've got a mortgage, you've probably gotten a special sweetheart deal sponsored by massive government intervention.

I'm not sure exactly what you're talking about because you neglected to say what "that" is, but assuming you mean either book or liquidation value, you'd assess SpaceX's book or liquidation value and then give a share of that to Musk.

Yes, it absolutely requires estimation. That's why we have so many different methods despite your assertion that "I haven't seen really any better ideas deployed". The only actual objective method for assessing the value of something is selling it. All other methods are estimates. Market capitalization is arguably the worst because it estimates the value of the whole based on what somebody pays for a (usually) very tiny piece. If I pay you a dollar for a blade of grass on your lawn does that make you a billionaire?

I don't disagree. I said back before the IPO that there were going to be a lot people people buying SpaceX stock as essentially a collectible, like DJT stock. That means most of the value depends on what Musk's next tweet is, or whether he has a heart attack tomorrow.

I don't think it's quite as irrational as you imply though. There is potential in space industry that cheap access opens up. How much is very much a matter of opinion, but it's not zero. Starlink is probably just the first example of something that was not economical at all pre-Falcon but is a pretty good business post-Falcon. There will be a bunch more if Starship delivers, which is looks like it probably will, eventually.

Anyway, "the market" is consenting adults. If somebody wants to blow $170 on a share of SpaceX without any regard for what it's actually worth that's not really much different than spending that much on a $20 bottle of wine at a restaurant. And if you think it's going to be a revolution in whatever, well, lots of people make proportionally bigger bets every day when they decide to start a business.

UID checks out.

Those early (and not so early) torpedos and missiles were pretty "anything that looks like a target in this area" flavour. I expect the Ukrainian drones are fairly comparable to them. But it says "drone" and "AI" so all the geeks lose their minds. They should have put "swarm" in there too.

There's a simple solution. Enforce your political donation limit laws.

The point of stock markets is to allow parts of companies to be bought and sold by the public. That's exactly what happened. The hint is in that last word, "market."

Everyone knows SpaceX's market valuation isn't super rational just like anyone walking into a Ferrari dealership knows that the price of the cars isn't rational.

There are lots of other ways to assess assets. Market cap is the biggest one, which is why it's always used in news articles.

https://www.investopedia.com/t...

The GP is talking about liquidation value. If you wanted to assess Musk's net worth the way you probably do yours, you'd use book value.

That describes many of the most powerful men in history. Musk often gets compared to Howard Hughes.

Not anymore. Public companies come with a bunch of restrictions on insiders selling their stock. Even if he did, he wouldn't get anywhere near a trillion dollars for it.