 |
|
|
|||||
A commercial spaceflight company that specializes in small- to medium-lift launch vehicles is hoping to have a giant-sized first day of trading today. Firefly Aerospace is expected to debut on the Nasdaq today as the companys initial public offering gains liftoff. Heres what you need to know about Firefly Aerospaces IPO and how the feud between the CEO of its competitor, SpaceX, and the president of the United States could give it an advantage. What is Firefly Aerospace? Firefly Aerospace Inc. is a space and defense technology company. Located in Cedar Park, Texas, it specializes in space launch and landing capabilities. In other words, the company helps get satellites and other vehicles into space. Founded in 2017, Firefly specializes in small- to medium-lift launch vehicles, as well as lunar landers and orbital vehicles. The company offers a number of spacecraft, including the Blue Ghost lander. According to Fireflys Form S-1 Registration Statement, which it filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Blue Ghost is the only commercial vehicle to have had a fully successful landing on the moon, which it achieved in March 2025. Firefly has a number of competitors in the space industry, including Elon Musks dominant SpaceX. Currently, Firefly says it has more than 800 employees (SpaceX has around 13,000, according to PitchBook) and boasts that its agility allows it to get a satellite into orbit with as little as 24 hours’ notice. Firefly operates at a loss Despite Fireflys impressive offerings, the company currently operates at a loss. This isnt unusual for a young company in the technology space, which often has high operational and research and development costs. In its S-1, Firefly stated that it had a net loss of $231.1 million for the year that ended December 31, 2024. That net loss was greater than the $135.5 million net loss the company experienced in the year that ended December 31, 2023. Most recently, the company said it had a net loss of $60.1 million for the three months that ended March 31, 2025. That was a net loss increase from the net loss of $52.8 million that Firefly experienced for the same period a year earlier. However, while the company is still operating at a loss, its total revenue has surged lately, although the revenue sum is relatively small. Firefly says it brought in total revenue of $55.9 million for the three-month period ending March 31, 2025. That was an increase of 572% from the same period a year earlier. It says revenue was helped by a 297% increase in its launch revenue for the quarter versus the quarter a year earlier, as well as a 623% in its spacecraft solutions revenue for the same timeframe. Still, Firefly says that it expects to continue to incur net losses for the next several years. When is Firefly Aerospaces IPO? Firefly priced its shares on Wednesday and expects to list its stock today (Thursday, August 7, 2025). What is Firefly Aerospaces stock ticker? Firefly Aerospaces stock will trade under the ticker FLY. What exchange will Firefly Aerospace shares trade on? Firefly Aerospace shares trade on the Nasdaq Global Market. What is the IPO share price of FLY? Firefly Aerospaces IPO price is $45 per share. This is a significant increase over its original target IPO price range of $35 to $39 a share. The target was then revised upwards to a range between $41 and $43 each. Finally, shares landed at $45 each. The increasing IPO price suggests that there is a healthy appetite for FLY shares. How many FLY shares are available in its IPO? According to a company press release, Firefly Aerospaces public offering consisted of 19,296,000 shares. How much did Firefly Aerospace raise in its IPO? With 19.2 million shares sold at $45 apiece, that means that Firefly raised approximately $868 million from its IPO. How much is Firefly Aerospace worth? Firefly Aerospace is now valued at approximately $6.3 billion, according to CNBC. Is the Trump-Musk feud beneficial for Firefly? Elon Musks privately held SpaceX is the dominant player in the commercial space industry with significant government contracts. However, Musk and President Trump had a historic and very public falling out earlier this year, leading many to assume that the schism could hurt SpaceXs business interests. Still, the U.S. government itself is heavily reliant on SpaceX to get its satellites into orbit. But as smaller space companies continue to grow and expand their capabilities, the U.S. government increasingly has more options to choose from. And given the Trump-Musk feud, it’s fair to wonder if other space companies will benefit from the rift. Whether or not there is a direct benefit to other companies from the feud is a game of speculation. However, Firefly Aerospace has recently gained from increasing government contracts. At the end of July, the company announced that it was awarded a $177 million contract from NASA to deliver five payloads from the countrys space agency to the moons south pole in 2029.
Category:
E-Commerce
Last week, President Donald Trumps super PAC revealed that it has an unsettling amount of cash on hand for a president who is, his occasional musings to the contrary notwithstanding, constitutionally ineligible to run for a third term in office. According to a midyear report filed with the Federal Election Commission, MAGA Inc. is sitting on nearly $200 million, a sum that includes a shade over $175 million collected just in the past six months. Unless collections fall off a cliff in the second half of the year, Trump should enter 2026 with well over a quarter-billion dollars to spend on the midterm electionsa war chest that would make him not only the Republican Partys unquestioned standard-bearer but also perhaps its deepest-pocketed financier for the foreseeable future. Many of the donors to MAGA Inc. would likely donate to any Republican president: real estate developers, oil and gas companies, firearms manufacturers, Wall Street banks, allegedly crooked mortgage brokers, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, and so on. Others made what proved to be prudent investments in their relationships with Trump, who has long viewed the presidency as a tool for rewarding loyal friends and punishing perceived enemies. A Florida personal injury attorney nominated by Trump as the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, for example, gave $500,000; an investor who now serves on the Presidents Intelligence Advisory Board gave $250,000. Longtime Trump donors Jeffrey Sprecher, whose company owns the New York Stock Exchange, and his wife, former Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, gave a cool $2.5 million apiece in June. In a wild coincidence, Trump announced that he would appoint Loeffler to lead the Small Business Administration six months earlier. But the most notable collection of namesand some of the biggest numbersare associated with the cryptocurrency industry, which has, in another wild coincidence, netted Trump and his family hundreds of millions of dollars since he took office in January. Foris Dax, which does business as Crypto.com, gave MAGA Inc. $10 million. Tools for Humanity, better known as World Network or Worldcoin (and cofounded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman), chipped in $5 million, as did Blockchain.com. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose eponymous Silicon Valley firm has invested heavily in crypto projects (including Tools for Humanity), combined to donate $6 million. The Winklevoss twins and their crypto exchange, Gemini Trust Company, donated a total of nearly $4 million. (Tyler donated about $15,000 more in his name than his brother, Cameron, which is how you can tell them apart.) All told, crypto and crypto-adjacent interests have contributed at least $40 million to MAGA Inc. so far this year. This figure does not include $5 million from Elon Musk, whose companies hold crypto assets worth billions of dollars. Despite his extremely funny public falling-out with Trump, Musk evidently still knows whats best for business: On June 27, he ponied up $5 million to the man who more or less just gave him the boot. The steady flow of cash to Trumps political machine is a peek at the struggle for control of the movement Trump creatednot necessarily now, when he is both president of the United States and the leader of the Republican Party, but over the next 24 months or so, as his term winds down and he prepares to return to Mar-a-Lago for good. Everyone involved here understands that it is not only the current White House that is for sale, but also the future of a party that has really not had an identity apart from Trump, a 79-year-old man who is decompensating before our eyes, for a decade now. Many of the people who are giving to MAGA Inc. are roughly analogous to investors racing to get in on the ground floor of a promising startup: For anyone who can foot the bill, the chance to own even a sliver of one of this countrys two major political parties is too valuable to pass up. And because the first six months of Trumps second administration have been so good for the crypto industry, its wealthier-than-ever luminaries have been among the most aggressive early buyers of (even more) political influence. They envision the country as a nascent Silicon Valley plutocracy, and themselves as its leadersequal parts fabulously wealthy oligarchs, industry-friendly regulators, and currency revolutionaries on the verge of making fiat money obsolete. Wealthy people have always been able to buy power in Washington, D.C., but rarely have they been this comfortable being this obvious about it. Part of the challenge with gauging the value of these investments is that there is basically no precedent for them. Super PACs have only been around since 2010, after the Supreme Courts decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened the floodgates to unlimited political spending by megacorporations and the billionaires who run them. As a result, President Barack Obama is the only other term-limited president who has ever raised money under the same circumstances, and at the time his supporters plainly did not perceive the same value in continuing to write checks: Again, over the past six months, MAGA Inc. has raked in around $175 million. As The New York Times notes, during the same period in 2013, the primary super PAC affiliated with Obama raised a grand total of $356,000. Generally, candidates from the same party as a sitting president face a tougher road to victory in the midterm elections that followa dynamic that is especially salient when a president whose approval rating was already dropping is also trying to fend off persistent questions about the nature of his friendship with the nations most famous child sex abuser. But the fact that Trump will be the GOPs de facto kingmaker in 2026 will make it very challenging for Republican candidates to break with himon the campaign trail, to the extent that any Republican candidates would have interest in doing so in the first place. If you want to win a primary, you cannot afford to pass up Trumps moneyor, worse yet, to do something to make him angry, such that he starts giving to your more enthusiastically MAGA opponent instead. What I am saying here is that the Republican candidates trying to win in purple districts next falland, in all likelihood, the serious contenders vying for the GOP presidential nomination in 2028are not going to be traditional conservatives trying to appeal to swing voters with promises of limited government and lower taxes. They are going to be Trump acolytes steeped in X clips and manosphere content who promise to do his and his donors bidding. Trumps dominance of the modern GOP has also come at the expense of what remains of the Republican establishment, whose leaders on Capitol Hill are now dealing with the consequences of having long ago ceded control of the party to a made-for-TV businessman who has never cared about its long-term success outside the context of his own political and financial fortunes. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC dedicated to electing Republicans to the House, had around $33 million in cash on hand as of June 30, and the GOP-affiliated Senate analogue came in just behind it, at $29.7 million. If youre doing the math at home, this means that the combined spending power of the Republican lawmakers trying to preserve their majorities in the House and Senate is about one-third the spending power of the partys outgoing president. The only group with anywhere close to as much money as MAGA Inc., The Times reports, is Fairshake, a super PAC backed byyou guessed itthe crypto industry. In other words, Republican candidates can take crypto industry cash funneled through MAGA Inc., or directly from its super PAC. But they are taking that money either way, and dealing with whatever strings come attached to it. For several years now, there has been an open question about what will happen to the Republican Party once Trump, for one reason or another, is no longer in control of it: whether it will revert to the establishment conservatives Trump has rendered all but irrelevant, or whether it will continue as a cult of personality propped up by a coalition of bigots, billionaires, and billionaires who are also bigots. MAGA Inc.s massive fundraising haul yields a grim answer: As venal as Trump is, the next generation of party leaders will be even more transparently for sale to the highest bidder. Those who can afford it are already spending accordingly.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trumps One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), recently signed into law, ushers in a number of new tax write-offs and credits. Some of those include the No Tax on Tips provision (which allows eligible tipped workers to deduct a portion of their income from tips on their federal income taxes), car loan and charitable donation deductions, and a child credit. However, other deductions that Trump’s tax bill did not renew will expire at the end of this year, including those related to student loan forgiveness. As a result, borrowers with certain federal student loans may have to pay more taxes. “There are two things that student loan borrowers need to know: There are changes in the way student debt is taxed, and the other is Congress didn’t extend tax-free student loan forgiveness,” Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC), told Fast Company. Some student loans may once again be taxed in 2026 “Forgiven student loan debt is generally considered taxable income in the year it’s discharged, Miryam Wisnicki, tax principal at CliftonLarsonAllen, told Fast Company. However, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily excluded certain types of student loan forgiveness from taxable income through December 31, 2025. This provision was enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and aimed to provide relief to borrowers.” But while student loan forgiveness remains tax-free through the end of 2025, it will be subject to income tax on the amount discharged starting at the beginning of 2026. Which student loan provisions will remain tax-free? The OBBBA did separately make some student-loan-related tax provisions permanent, according to Wisnicki: Loan discharge due to death or total disability will continue to be excluded from taxable income. Employer-provided student loan repayment assistanceup to $5,250 annuallywill remain tax-free under qualified educational assistance programs. This benefit, previously set to expire at the end of 2025, is now permanent and will be adjusted annually for inflation. New loan limits While undergraduate loan limits won’t change, they will for graduate students and parent borrowers, NPR reported. The new law puts a cap on unsubsidized student loans for graduate students at $20,500 per year and $100,000 for a lifetime (down from $138,500). It caps borrowing for professional degrees, for example in law or medicine, at $50,000 per year and $200,000 for a lifetime (up from $138,500). It limits federal student loan borrowing to a total of $257,500 for a lifetime (for both undergraduate and graduate studies). It also caps borrowing for parents through the federal Parent PLUS loan program at $20,000 per year per student and $65,000 for a lifetime, which, according to the SBPC, could force millions into a risky private market. The law eliminates the Graduate PLUS loan program for all new students on July 1, 2026, gutting a critical financial aid program that had previously allowed eligible graduate and professional students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for their advanced degree. How will the new law affect repayment options? After July 1, 2026, borrowers with new loans will have only two repayment options: a new standard option and a new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) option based on income. Current borrowers with loans taken out before July 1, 2026, will continue to have access to an Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plan and can continue to enroll in or remain on an Income-Driven Repayment plan, but will need to switch to IBR or RAP by July 1, 2028. Current borrowers who take on any new loan after July 1, 2026, including a consolidation loan, will be eligible only for RAP or the new standard plan, per the SBPC. According to NPR, experts have said monthly RAP payments for many middle-income borrowers will be lower compared with earlier RAP plans, but not as low as they were on the previous Saving on a Valuable Education option. Meanwhile, the lowest-income borrowers will make a minimum monthly payment of $10, or $120 per year, instead of $0. “Congress eliminated the most generous repayment terms and replaced it with a new plan that will cost more money,” Pierce explained. “It is making sure that the lowest-income borrowers have to pay something.” There are still many ways to get your student debt canceled, Pierce said, but the canceled debt will be treated as taxable income: “For example, an average borrower who earns $50,000 a year would end up paying $2,200 more in taxes a year for every $10,000 that is canceled.”
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||