Compare / SpaceX vs Pinterest
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
SpaceX
BUSINESS MODEL
SpaceX
SpaceX makes money three ways. First, launch services — companies and governments pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit.
A Falcon 9 launch costs about $67 million, which undercut the competition by 75% when it debuted. Second, Starlink — SpaceX's own satellite internet constellation, which now brings in well over $10 billion a year from more than 8 million subscribers and has quietly become the part of the business that funds everything else.
Third, government contracts — NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station and the DoD pays for national security launches.
The secret sauce is reusability. Before SpaceX, every rocket was used once and thrown into the ocean.
SpaceX figured out how to land the first stage booster back on Earth and fly it again. A single Falcon 9 booster has flown over 20 times.
That's like the difference between throwing away an airplane after every flight versus keeping it for decades.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
SpaceX
In 2001 Elon Musk was already rich from selling Zip2, and the eBay deal that would hand him roughly $180 million after taxes for his PayPal stake was still a year away. Most people in that position buy an island.
Musk decided to buy rockets. His original idea was even weirder — he wanted to send a small greenhouse to Mars called "Mars Oasis" to reignite public interest in space exploration.
He flew to Russia three times to buy refurbished ICBMs. The Russians kept raising the price and at one point literally spat on him.
On the flight home from that last failed Russia trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and started calculating the raw material costs of building a rocket from scratch. He realized the materials were only about 3% of the typical price of a rocket.
The rest was markup, inefficiency, and monopoly pricing by companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. He decided to build his own.
SpaceX was founded in June 2002 in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. Musk put in $100 million of his own money.
He hired Tom Mueller, a legendary rocket propulsion engineer who had been building rocket engines in his garage as a hobby. The first rocket, Falcon 1, was supposed to be the cheapest orbital rocket ever built.
It took six years and three spectacular explosions before it finally worked.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
SpaceX
SpaceX's growth strategy was simple: be cheaper than everyone, then be better than everyone, then be the only option.
They started by undercutting the launch market. The United Launch Alliance (Boeing + Lockheed Martin joint venture) was charging $300-400 million per launch.
SpaceX offered $67 million. Government agencies and commercial satellite companies started lining up.
Reusability was the real game-changer. Landing a rocket booster looked like science fiction when SpaceX first attempted it in 2013.
They failed over and over — spectacular ocean landings, explosions on drone ships, near-misses. But in December 2015, a Falcon 9 first stage landed back at Cape Canaveral.
It was the first time an orbital-class rocket had ever landed after a mission. Now they do it routinely — it's almost boring.
Starlink created a completely new revenue stream. Instead of just launching other people's satellites, SpaceX launched thousands of its own.
Starlink passed 8 million subscribers and well over $10 billion in annual revenue. It turned SpaceX from a launch company into a telecom company.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
SpaceX
The early days nearly killed the company. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches all failed.
The first one in 2006 crashed 25 seconds after liftoff due to a corroded fuel line nut. The second in 2007 reached space but the second stage shut down early.
The third in 2008 failed because the first and second stages collided during separation. Musk had enough money for one more attempt.
If flight four failed, SpaceX was dead.
Flight four worked. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fuel rocket to reach orbit.
Musk has said he was so stressed during that period he was throwing up regularly.
The financial pressure was existential. Musk was simultaneously funding Tesla, which was also on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008.
He had to split his last $40 million between the two companies. He borrowed money for rent.
But right at the end of 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. That contract saved the company.
Starship development has been its own saga. The rocket has exploded multiple times during testing.
Each failure costs hundreds of millions. But SpaceX treats failures as data — they move faster by blowing things up and iterating than competitors do by being cautious.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
SpaceX
Falcon 9 is the workhorse — the most-launched rocket in the world. It carries satellites to orbit and astronauts to the ISS, and the first stage lands itself for reuse.
Falcon Heavy is three Falcon 9 boosters strapped together — the most powerful operational rocket in the world until Starship came along. Dragon is the spacecraft that carries astronauts and cargo to the ISS.
It's the only American vehicle currently flying humans to space. Starlink is the satellite internet service — more than 8,000 satellites in orbit delivering broadband to 100+ countries, and the business that funds much of the rest.
Starship is the big one — the tallest and most powerful rocket ever built, designed to carry 100+ people to Mars. It has flown repeatedly, including full orbital-profile flights and booster catches.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
SpaceX
Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Google, Fidelity Investments, Valor Equity Partners, Baillie Gifford, a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), NASA (as customer/partner)
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.