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The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.
Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.
Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital, and it's sales, at least in Europe, were fueled by virtue signalling. Now imagine the look on the face of the exact type of person, that wants to be seen as saving the planet, suddenly being seen as a Nazi instead. Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly, so I consider Elon to be a dead man walking, if he loses political backing. The drama being about the budget, I wonder if he wasn't hoping for some bailout to be included there, which didn't materialize.
Anyway, if being cut loose is a foregone conclusion, he might figure that he might as well drag everyone else down with him.
That's an interesting play, since a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets, so maybe he'll manage to stir the pot this way. But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
Not anymore, surprisingly. Musk owns about an eighth of Tesla, for about $125B of market cap (if he could sell it all without tanking the stock, which he can't, but that applies to all his equities), but he's got over 40% of SpaceX, which at its latest valuation gives him more like $135B capital there.
Nah, but they've been flat for 2 years after skyrocketing for the previous 2, which is nearly as bad a change for anyone holding stock at a P/E justified by future growth.
That's true, but it's not the budget that'll explode (except for the military, by like 25%?), it's just the deficit, via tax cuts. And nearly all Trump's base (like most other Republicans and probably most Democrats, to be fair) are fine taking lower taxes now at the cost of larger but more complicated fiscal and monetary problems at some uncertain future date.
Was it actually sold to anyone at that price? Even stonk market valuations are often nothing more than memes, but at least they have an advantage of being an actual market price.
-13% worldwide sounds like declining, especially with the rest of the EV market growing. -50% in Europe does indeed sound like "tanking".
$1.25B of it, to "SpaceX, as well as investors" - it was partially a stock buyback.
Yeah, that's all fair. I was looking at total revenue trailing 12 months, but was misled by both the "total" (declining auto revenue is partly offset by rising energy production+storage revenue) and "12 months" (the last released quarter specifically looks awful; I guess people weren't expecting Trump to win and really focus the anti-Elon hate?) parts of that.
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If we wanted to reduce healthcare spending's share of the economy back to where it was in 2000 under Bill Clinton (Most of the increase occurred under George W. Bush. Obamacare just froze it in place.), we'd have to cut it by 25%. This would cause a drop in GDP roughly equivalent to the 2008 recession.
Health spending is especially troublesome because it blows up government budgets and private spending largely draws from the same middle to upper-middle class taxpayers (If we wanted to be elegant, take the SALT caucus as avatars of this.) whose taxes would need to increase to balance the budget.
Even otherwise decent red state GOP governments have done nothing to address health spending in their locales.
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If you want a top tier electric car these days, get a BYD, not a Tesla. Tesla only has the best self driving these days and if that's not important to you or you don't think regulations will permit it in your jurisdiction any time soon there's no reason to go Tesla anymore. It has nothing to do with virtue signalling.
I don't know what to tell you man, from my neighbors to coworkers, it's a very specific type of person that even thinks of buying an EV.
Interesting. From my neighbours and coworkers the only people even looking at ICE cars these days are petrolheads who like the vroom vroom. If you're not one of those in my circles if you're buying a new car nobody even considers anything not electric. Used cars sure people still care about petrol models but that too is a declining portion.
I don't know if you include hybrids in that but I see plenty of people getting hybrids. Its a combination of lack of charging infrastructure and perhaps a Sweden specific issue (in the context of Europe) of people genuinely driving longer distances relatively regularly, leading to range issues. This is not at all a question of cost, seeing as hybrids are as or even more expensive than pure electric.
Its about 50/50 with electric and hybrids sales.
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Aren't you some London finance quant? The only way to get less representative of the average European from that is if you married into literal aristocracy.
Sure, I fully admit that my circles are not representative of the general population, but trends like these generally percolate down over like a decade to the common man. And btw, I'm personally looking at getting a BYD Sealion (which btw, at 522 bhp has an engine basically as powerful as a Jaguar XJ220 for the petrolheads,) at some point, which can hardly be called a luxury car.
ICE cars make noise and little else. Electric cars are like your very own quiet and dependable yet extremely powerful vahana.
Percolation will depend on how cost effective the tech gets. It might happen at some point, but until then EV's will mostly be a matter of virtue signalling.
And even if it does happen, it's a separate question if Tesla pulls it off, or gets outpaced by competitors.
Evs are already superior than gas vehicles for a small but growing proportion of use cases. Fully 2/3rds of my trips happen by electric unicycle these days, and once i hit that my mileage goal (2000 miles, enough to pay for the uni by counting avoided gas spending and depreciation on my car) I'll upgrade to a faster suspension wheel and interested that proportion even further.
For a single person (or pair of adults) in an urban area, EVs and PEVs are great and getting better.
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Sure, but we're talking about the average person who buys an EV, which is already a very small portion of the population in the first place.
If the circles he's describing were the majority of EV owners, why would car companies bother making anything other than luxury car EVs, and gas poeered cars for the middle class?
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Weird, I realize we're playing dueling anecdotes but I can't remember a single person I know talking about the environmental aspects of their Tesla. The comments they make generally included some mix of:
-- SEE HOW FUCKING FAST IT IS, 0-60 under 4 seconds, it has power instantly, etc...
-- I never have to get gas, sometimes justly limited to convenience but often with fuzzy math about costs
-- It's cool looking
-- It's an amazing feat of engineering
But never anything about the environment. Of course, I live in a much more rural area, so maybe people who live in more urban areas are making "excuses" for owning a car at all, where my compatriots are assuming that any functional middle class man must own a car? They might well have made the choice for environmental reasons privately and choose not to say so to me, but I know a lot of prius owners who talked about environmental reasons for their choices.
Certainly the idea that Tesla can only sell cars through left wing virtue signaling is belied by the number of cybertrucks on the road.
The genius of Musk was not to invent the electric car, there were EVs on the market before Tesla was a thing. The difference was that these cars were very clearly not performing as well as ICE cars given and more expensive.
By contrast, a Tesla is (I think) on par with high-end ICE cars in how much fun it is to drive. For example, if you wanted a car to impress women in 2014, I think you could do worse than a Tesla: not only is is as good a status symbol as a fancy German car, but you will also get bonus points with any woman worrying about climate change.
The fact that fancy German car makers now produce electric vehicles is mostly due to Tesla's success.
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Where are you from, roughly?
Europe can be very weird about this sort of stuff. My wife got an e-bike figuring it'll be a bit healthier to get off her ass, even if assisted by electricity, and the whole office was oohing and aahing over her "social awareness" for weeks.
Oh, must be America, I think they're illegal here.
I'm right where the northeast boswash megalopolis gives way to farm country, the last highway exit on the east coast. Twenty minutes east I'm at a small city LGBT center, twenty minutes west I'm at an Amish farm stand.
I am now nearly certain we live within 100 miles of one another.
We must never meet. My mental image of you is as a 7'9" Ajax hurling kettlebells at random passers-by a la Donkey Kong. I cannot support the dismantling of that fiction.
If you ever wanna grab a Yuengling, just slide into my DMs I'm buying.
You'll have to go to good ol' @WhiningCoil for the great kettlebell exploits, though.
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Yeah, that checks out.
Soon brother, soon.
It's a gag, obviously, but also... I really do, when I think about it, feel most at home in the geographic territory of Wawa, so roughly between I-80 and the Outer Banks, and east of the Appalachians. That's basically my homeland.
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Ha. Me and my wife are one of the few people in our circle of acquantainces who don't own a car, and quite a few of them (themselves owning cars!) instantly started treating us like green compatriots. Led to a few awkward moments when they became aware that we're not only doing it out of money concerns (work, daycare and shopping is all easily reachable by bike in less than 10 minutes for us, and we don't travel that much) but that we are ideologically most aligned with pragmatist center-libertarian views. And that's despite hiding our power levels.
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Absolutely this. Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rethoric - and secondly the choice to not pick a Tesla might have been justified by practicality, but let's be frank: it isn't. What it is is "Musk man bad". EVs are like anything related to the whole "carbon is killing the planet" narrative and its associated Ablaßhandel (Indulgence/Pardon Industry) - 100% virtue signalling.
It's so very obvious that as far as I'm concerned, any claim to the contrary will need thorough justification. I'd have to contort myself into a pretzel of charity to pretend otherwise.
Just this past week my wife and I have been discussing replacing a ten year old ICE car with an EV. The main motivations are simpler maintenance and charging from our solar panels.
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I do not think that climate change is an x-risk. I do not even believe that climate change will necessarily flood big parts of the landmasses, likely we can handle a few meters of sea level rise the Netherlands way.
However, this is not the same as saying that it is not a big deal. The amount of population regions can feed will definitely change, and often for the worse.
Besides CO2, there are a few other arguments against ICEs. First, as long as fossil fuels are the lifeblood of transportation, the world will always be beholden to the few countries which are blessed with that resource. GWB's misadventure in Iraq was a consequence of that region having oil and thus being of strategic importance to the US and his buddies.
Then there are regional health effects of minor combustion products. I will totally grant you that ICEs have improved tremendously since the 1970s in that regard. Still, depending on where you live, my gut feeling is that these products might still make up a good fraction of a QALY for you. Even if you don't care personally, it should be apparent that society is caring more and more for these things over time. If you by a fancy new ICE car today, there is perhaps a 10% chance that you will not be allowed to drive it withing some European cities without retrofitting more exhaust cleaning in a decade.
Then you might believe that the gas prices will increase more than the electricity prices in the long run.
Also, while modern ICEs are marvels of technology which evolved to be very reliably over a century, the fact remains that fundamentally, they are complex machines. In principle, an EV could be a lot simpler. In practice, we don't know yet (apart from the battery requiring replacement at some point).
Personally, I would not have bought either a Tesla or a high end German EV because I don't care for the status symbol aspect and want a car where I do not have to freak out about every minor dent. Other than that, of course people pick brands based on politics. If Apple's CEO made a statement defending Nethanyahu's operations in Gaza, of course Apple sales would plummet. If a fast-food chain sponsored a campaign to lower the age of consent to five years, they would find that most of their customers would take their business elsewhere. When Putin attacked Ukraine, Europe became a lot less interested in buying his gas, even though the gas had not changed at all.
Most tech CEOs know better than to get openly involved in partisan politics. Musk made the business decision that the goodwill of a Trump administration he had loudly backed before would be worth the hit to his brands, or at least better for him than a Harris administration he had stayed neutral about.
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I'll bite. I have an EV, and it had nothing to do with virtue signalling (and being "green" was little more than an afterthought). I bought an EV because when I was looking for new cars, I tried them out and loved them. The torque, the smooth ride, the lack of vibrations, noise, or smell. I will probably never go back to ICE. The convenience of never having to go to a gas station or get an oil change again really is awesome.
It does of course come with some caveats: I was able to put a charger in my garage. Charging at home is the real game-changer for EVs. And I mostly only drive locally. @100ProofTollBooth is right that I wouldn't choose it for a "go explore remote mountain trails" car. (That said, modern EVs have a 300+ mile range, so it's not that easy to run out of battery without very poor planning.)
Also, I did not buy a Tesla, and again, not because I have Musk Derangement Syndrome. Teslas have the best software, generally, but other than that, a lot of EV makers beat them on comfort and performance (and I just don't like having everything be controlled by a tablet).
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This really is way out of date. For a lot of people in cities and suburbs, 99% of driving tasks are within a hundred miles or so of home and an EV provides lower TCO, the more so the more miles you drive. It especially makes sense for a family that already has an ICE car to use for road trips. I am even aware of militia-adjacent preppers that are high on EVs due to being able to fully sustain them off the grid.
I personally will probably want to replace my 2012 Fusion at some point in the next few years and am waffling between EV or ICE. I don't tend to drive a lot of miles so TCO is probably a wash unless gas prices go way up, but the raw performance of electric and idea of being able to "refuel" in my own garage is really appealing. Having to charge on road trips is the biggest downside.
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I broadly agree. For a certain subset of owners, they've literally labeled themselves as virtue signalers.
I have now seen Tesla's with bumper stickers that read "I bought this before Elon was a Nazi" or something to that effect.
Publicly broadcasting that you feel the need to qualify your previous purchase with a political semi-re-(un?)-justification is a sign of deep commitment to virtue signalling above all other considerations. I have zero tolerance for such people.
Regarding EVs in general, while I am not categorically against them, they still fail a very simply problem for me that gas 100% solves (and has for sometime).
Say that I am in the mountains (because I am!) I want to drive around to some various trails and fishing spots and whatnot. Uh-oh, running low on gas, and I'm 30 miles from a gas station. Thankfully, I've got a 5 gallon gas can on the outside of my truck.
With an EV, I don't believe a "pony battery" is possible? Correct me if I'm wrong. Even more to the point, with US infrastructure construction permitting being what it is, how long would it realistically take to get EV supercharger stations in all of the same rural locations that currently have well functioning gas stations?
This points to another issue with EVs but Tesla's specifically. The people who are really into them are inherently bought in to the idea of complex system dependency. It's hilarious to me that, in Teslas, if your car needs a software update - you can't drive it. If your main dashboard panel breaks for whatever reason, you can't roll your windows down. When planning a road trip, the Tesla software cannot simply plot the fastest route from A to B, but it must factor in recharging stations and battery life. Because of how battery recharging works, you will also likely be driving at between 20 - 50% charge for much of the time. Hilarious. How do we use this complex system we've created? Well, we hack it so that it kind of works in a counter-intuitive way. Also, don't deviate from your pre-planned course to much.
This is the very definition of over-engineered. But, I believe, for many Tesla owners, that is also the very point.
They are showing themselves to be virtue signalers, but that doesn't mean they bought an EV to signal how much they cared about the environment. It just means they claim they wouldn't buy a Tesla in 2025, which is just being sensitive to social stigma; perhaps it also means engaging in political boycotts.
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This could very well be true in the US, but at least in Western Europe, governments subsidise the hell out of EVs through either direct subsidies to the manufacturers and distributers or indirect tax subsidies, and some cities (London, Paris, I assume others) explicitly discourage or even disallow non-EVs from certain areas.
Because of this, if you are in Europe and are:
It's probably in your best interest financially to buy an EV, or at the very least a hybrid.
You could argue this is second-hand virtue signalling, but the end purchaser who will make the decision as to what they buy is probably thinking mostly of practicality. I currently drive a hybrid purely for financial reasons (and since having owned it, I am far more partial to EVs and would consider them in future), and most of the people I know who drive EVs do so either for tax purposes or because they live in an urban area.
And both of these purchasers would be particularly attuned to the inverse-virtue-signalling presently associated with purchasing a Tesla (e.g. I am aware of a European company that has this year taken every Tesla off of its 'approved vehicles' list for company cars, and when pressed on why, they said they didn't want the brand "associated with any political direction"). This means that even if the initial purchase was primarily a financial decision rather than virtue signaling, you can still then be swayed by "Musk man bad".
I've lived in cities with emission norms, and even diesels are allowed in as long as they're relatively new. London and Paris might have gone literally zero emission, though I've never had to drive in either so can't confirm, and they'd be an exception.
Subsidies don't seem to be enough to sway any normie I've met, and the type of person I've met that has an EV still very much fits into the profile we were discussing with Southkraut.
EVs are exempt from the London Congestion Charge (to be replaced with a 50% discount from next year) and get discounts on residents' parking permits in most boroughs. But there isn't anywhere EVs can go where petrol or diesel cars can't. But the direct subsidies to EVs are lower in Europe than in the US - the big difference is that the running cost advantage of an EV is larger because petrol is more expensive here.
Essentially all minicabs on London streets (including Ubers) are hybrids - a quick check of the stats suggests that EVs are about 20% of the UK new car market and hybrids about 25%. Note that fleet purchases are (unusually by global standards) 60% of the market in the UK - this is part of why Tesla's market share is so low - they don't put much effort into fleet sales.
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Fair points. I live in the countryside, so urban concerns are somewhat invisible to me.
That makes sense and in itself reflects a much larger problem: often, policies regarding EV mandates are made with urban areas in mind, where the infrastructure is in the process of being entirely revamped to suit them at the expense of ICE vehicles, whereas once you drive five minutes outside the capital, you can't find a charger, you can't find an EV dealer, and your income drops below the required amount to purchase one in the first place.
Even though my preference is towards EVs for a multitude of reasons, if I lived rural there's no chance in hell I'd use one. Getting off-topic here but it's one of the major reasons I feel EVs have found less uptake in the USA, Canada, and Australia when compared to Europe, which then gets retrofitted to more sensationalist cultural/political lines.
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He does still have an uncontested dominance of spaceflight... Pretty far from dead man walking IMO!
Plus Tesla is by far the largest electric car producer in America, it's not like they'll allow Chinese competition in America. They have one of the world's biggest markets locked down. Europe has always favoured European vehicles, it's understandable that Volkswagen is in the lead there.
The competition is catching up, and Starship has so far been nothing but a money furnace. Unless you show me how much money he's making from it, clean, I stand by my words.
Where sales are also declining, and there's no product on the horizon to reverse the trend. The money was thrown into gimmicks that are either proven abortions like the CyberTruck, or ones that are likely to follow it's fate, like Semi, Robotaxi/Cybercab, or Optimus. No sign of Roadster, that a bunch of people are actually waiting for.
Having the market locked down means nothing. Blues will sooner return to gasoline cars before supporting Musk, and Reds weren't ever that hot on EVs to begin with. He Budweiser'd himself.
This wasn't the case until very recently. Most EV's I see on the road that I see are still Teslas.
Lol, lmao even. The competition is quite literally being left on the ground while SpaceX is by far the most advanced launch company on (and leaving) Earth. This (pdf warning) is a handy little summary of 2024 launch activities. There were 263 total orbital launch attempts last year, of which 134 were SpaceX Falcon 9s (132 standards, 2 heavies). 133 of those attempts were successful, for a demonstrated reliability rate over 99%. So more than half of all launches last year were SpaceX, and they are more reliable than anyone else. But even this number vastly understates the actual capabilities gap. While numerically having 50% of the launches, the Falcon family put more than 90% of the total mass into orbit because they can carry substantially larger payloads than any of their competitors (the Falcon heavy in particular can roughly double anything else's mass to LEO). Putting the very large cherry on top is the fact that no one else is remotely close to cost-competitive with Falcon 9 below $3k per kg and Heavy below $2k per kg, while everyone else including the Chinese who use ICBM boosters and drop their rockets into populated villages all north of $5k per kg.
So the current state of play is that the SpaceX workhorse, the Falcon 9, is at a minimum twice as capable in cost and capacity metrics compared to all of the competition, while being substantially more technically advanced. Its the only rocket currently active that incorporates re-use in any meaningful fashion, its the only rocket currently flying with engine-out capability, and its the only rocket currently flying that can do school-bus style launches where customers can buy a small chunk of the total launch mass and get their payloads inserted into independent orbits.
Everyone else is just playing catch-up with the Falcon 9 at this point, and having a hard time with it. Its fair to say SpaceX is at least a generstion ahead on the general launch vehicle front. But the hell of it is the Falcon 9 is going to be made obsolete by Starship, which will be even cheaper and have vastly more payload capacity. Are there problems currently? Yes, absolutely, the block 2 second stage seems to have some very big problems. But the whole "catching the booster" thing seems to be fairly well solved, which is mind boggling. No one else has any true first-gen re-use capability for even their boosters, and SpaceX has a fairly well developed second gen platform. The second stage needs some work clearly, but you get optimized platforms by experimenting, and thats what they're doing.
I guess this all seems like fanboying, but it is wild to me that one of the most technically complex and expensive markets ever developed by humanity is so wildly skewed towards one participant based purely on execution and not things like massive government intervention/control (Long March, Arienne).
I literally thought they were joking the first time I heard the "catch the rockets in giant robot arms" proposal. Under careful consideration it makes a ton of sense to keep as much mass and complexity as you can on the ground rather than attached to the rocket, but come on. Giant robot arms.
New Glenn might be there soon: they successfully reached orbit using a booster that could in theory be landed and reused, even if that first attempt didn't survive reentry.
Maybe Electron too: they've recovered at least half a dozen orbital boosters (albeit via splashdown, not landing), and they've reflown an engine. I'd bet against them reflying a whole booster this year (splashdown is rough, and it sounds like their recovered boosters have only recently started passing any requalification tests), but I wouldn't bet a lot.
It is embarrassing for everyone else who thinks of themselves as a launch provider, though, isn't it? The first reflight of a new orbital booster design was done by SpaceX, and the second was again by SpaceX, now with a design ten times bigger.
You say "massive government intervention/control" like it was a benefit rather than an obstacle. Government space used cost-plus contracts, tried to create as many jobs as possible with as many subcontractors as possible, considered commercial applications to be an afterthought to money-is-no-object military use cases, and ended up captured by contractors to the point where Senators wouldn't even allow NASA to talk about any ideas like orbital refueling that might undercut the most expensive contracts' justifications. The only way that kind of behavior can lead to market capture is by making the market look so unattractive that nobody with enough money to enter it would be insane enough to try.
The US space program started out as a massive government push, and during the heyday of the Apollo program NASA's budget went as high as 4.4% of the entire federal budget. It definitely got results, and its the reason any space program exists at all. Lots of bad behavior has definitely snuck in since those days, but without the whole Space Race thing there is zero chance we have anything like the industry we have today.
Looking at the rest of the globe there is a strong correlation between "has an actual space industry" and current or prior national level "Space Race"-tier efforts. I.e. Russia and China have actual launch capabilities, their direct geopolitical adversaries in Japan and India have developed fledgling capabilities in response (as has Israel due to similar threats), and then you get giant blocks of highly educated, wealthy, sophisticated nations that have somehow managed to produce what is recognized in official policy documents as more of a jobs handout than actual space program, mostly due to a complete lack of any initial kick in the butt.
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Yes, I've heard all that. Most of these are in-house for Starlink, and Musk is on record screaming at his employees that without Starship they won't be making much (any? He just said "poor financials") money with it.
Just please, won't someone show the actual profit the company is making. Literally none of this "dominance" matters if it can't bail out his failing endeavors.
You are asking for non-public numbers that being a non-public company SpaceX is under no obligation to provide. The current best guess is that Starlink (and its defense version Starshield) account for roughly 2/3rds of the company's revenue, and since most of that is for actual services rather than hardware it probably has a decent profit margin, but everyone has their own assumptions.
I know Musk is one of the richest people on Earth, but even he doesn't have unlimited cash to throw at a failing endevour. Jeff Bezos is also one of the richest people on Earth, and his rocket company Blue Origin is actually older, but has done far, far less in that same timeframe. If I get to invest my own cash, I'd put it 100% with SpaceX.
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SpaceX has a hell of a lot of long-term government and military contracts. Blue Origin is about the only other company that might end up being major competition, eventually, but only in the long term. Blue Origin currently has its own major problems and dysfunctions and doesn’t have much actual developed capability yet. SpaceX’s only actual peer competitor, Roscosmos, is now unavailable in the Western market for security reasons, due to being owned by the government of a now-hostile state.
Starship is just the flashy sports car to create brand awareness, and potentially develop future capabilities. It’s not the bread and butter. The cost of the Starship project is quite small compared to the SpaceX bottom line and even if it flames out completely it’s not going to even get close to tanking the whole company.
Yes, some of them are even nearly overdue, and are fixed priced, no matter how many Starships get blown up!
His Artemis contract depends on it working, and even then I have huge doubts about their galaxy-brained plan of a dozen refuels per trip to the moon.
1-2 billion per year according to Musk himself. What's their bottom line?
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Yeah, and those are getting to be less important. SpaceX used to have relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, and nothing else; today they have larger but still relatively equal revenues from government vs private launches, but the sum is being dwarfed by Starlink subscriptions. Even when they get a peer competitor for launch provision, that competitor is going to need some time to launch a competitor to SpaceX's several-thousand-satellite constellation.
Well, they've had one successful launch (albeit with an unsuccessful booster recovery) of a rocket that's aiming at roughly twice the payload of Falcon 9 for the same price. Their development's been extremely slow but it's likely to start ramping up soon and they've got incredibly deep pockets to keep trying.
If you mean present peer competitor, Roscosmos doesn't make the cut. Dozens of launches a year is nice, but it's not hundreds. SpaceX has no present peer competitors.
If you mean future peer competitor, there's a pretty wide field of relatively near-term possibilities. China's got a half dozen space startups working on Falcon 9 class vehicles; none are at SpaceX's level yet but like 4 of them have at least reached orbit. Rocket Lab has put Electron in orbit dozens of times now and Neutron should be a decent Falcon 9 competitor. Firefly has made orbit a few times, and (after launching on a Falcon 9, admittedly) was the first commercial company to successfully soft-land on the moon. Relativity Space and Stoke are long shots right now, but Stoke is an interesting long shot working on full reusability.
Yeah, but SpaceX needs the future capabilities to continue being SpaceX. Mass delivery of remote high-speed internet is a sweet cash cow, but it's not The Dream that got a bunch of high talent to work for them for super-long hours at barely-competitive salaries. Falcon rockets won't take anybody to Mars, and SpaceX without the driving goal of putting humanity on Mars would just turn into another decaying Boeing.
Also, the Starship program is also pretty significant a cost still. They've spent like $5B over the project lifetime, and are ramping up hard now, probably nearly $2B this year out of revenues of maybe $15B. It makes sense, since they're probably also spending like $2B this year on Starlink launches and are salivating at the prospect of cutting that by an order of magnitude while increasing capacity, but it only makes sense if it eventually works. Everybody used to say that the R&D to make Falcon 9 reusable was a waste, that it would never pay for itself, and they were so wrong about that that nobody thoughtful seems to dare to suggest the same for Starship, but it's still not impossible that they just can't get cheap second stage reuse working and the pessimism will turn out to be right this time.
Alright so which one of those half dozen Chinese start-ups will the US government trust to launch its incredibly classified spy satellites?
Spy satellites contribute so little to the total mass to orbit that you never even needed SpaceX for that (i don't consider Starlink a primarily national security project, because it's not).
For delivering payloads, including probably international ones, China will begin catching up next year. I do not assume that Americans will be contracting them, no, so in that sense SpaceX is poised to maintain its near-monopoly.
It is believed that the crop of reusable rocket startups is attributable to Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, getting into National People's Congress, and advocating for legalization of private space businesses in 2010s. So far, there have been three Chinese entities that have conducted VTOL tests for reusable rockets.
There are others which are further behind.
Technologically, they are several iterations behind, but strategically I'd say they save significant advantages over the current SpaceX (a usual feature of Chinese fast-following). For example Space Epoch Yuanxingzhe-1 is basically a small Starship (or a better, thicker Falcon-9, if Falcon-9 were designed today). Stainless steel, metholox, will naturally plug into the existing and state-subsidized logistics, including military facilities that currently produce aviation parts (as a small point, Falcon's extreme height-to-width ratio is obviously suboptimal and downstream of American highway standards, but China had no problem building dedicated roads). LandSpace Zhuque-3 VTVL-1 is similar (they can boast of the first metholox engine to make it to orbit).
But as you rightfully notice, it's not clear if this will have much effect on the SpaceX bottom line, since Americans can saturate their cadence anyway. In all likelihood it will only unnerve some people in Washington as a symbolic thing.
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Well if you assume that all Musk's projects will fail, then yes I would agree that he's a dead man warning.
Sometimes Musk succeeds and other times he fails. His attempt to make his own Dojo AI chip failed. But he's doing pretty well on AI with Nvidia chips, Grok 3 is better than anything Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon has come up with.
Maybe Starship fails, maybe it succeeds. If there was no Starship wouldn't you say something like 'oh the competition is catching up, how is he going to stay ahead, there's no product on the horizon'? Developing new products isn't easy, rockets have been known to fail. Who even is the competition? The entire Chinese state and private sector? Bezos who just got into orbit in 2025? ULA? ESA? SpaceX makes them all look puny.
What are the odds that all Musk's upcoming products fail? Robotaxis and Optimus will fail? Well then Tesla would be in a bad place. But how do you know that?
What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things? I'm pretty sure you don't fail your way into hundreds of billions of dollars. The media has a skewed perspective on Musk. Whenever Tesla stock goes down we get a morality tale of 'evil never prospers' where you can just sense their glee, yet when Tesla stock goes up (up by 50% since March) there's a mysterious silence.
The issue is that the relevant reference class is arguably "everything Musk does since he became a druggie". Until Grok, the last thing a Musk company did that didn't suck was the Tesla Model Y launch in 2019, and that was a minor variant on the 3 - the last difficult thing was the Falcon Heavy in 2018. Since they we have seen the Cybertruck (yuck), the 2nd-gen Roadster (not), the Semi (kinda), the 25,000 USD Tesla (just cancelled), FSD (based on non-standard meanings of "full" and "self" and about 5 years behind Waymo), Starship (subject to rapid unscheduled dissassembly), a deeply underwhelming Boring Company, and Twitter ending up bailed out with XAI's VC money. Oh - and DOGE breaking things without actually cutting spending.
So the case for "Musk has lost the secret sauce" is quite strong. The case for "Musk still has it" is being made by people who are already calling Starship and FSD as successes. The case for "Musk has mostly lost it, but is investable anyway" is that one Grok makes up for a lot of flops.
The bull case for Tesla is based on a pivot to a new AI/robotics business that doesn't exist yet. (Even Tesla bulls don't think the core automotive business is worth more than about 5x10^11 USD), so enough people still believe that Musk can do it again to keep buying the shares.
I'm still skeptical of 'Musk cooked his brain with drugs' as a narrative. Have any of these commentators actually met the guy? Or are they familiar with him through media only? If we believed the media on Putin, he was supposed to have died of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer and maybe another dozen things by now. But this isn't so. Just because journalists don't like him, he isn't necessarily in ill health.
Plus you're forgetting the brain implants that let a guy play games while completely disabled, Neuralink is state-of-the-art albeit not a revolutionary breakthrough. What about the satellite network that kept Ukraine in the fight? What about nuking Kamala's election chances?
Roughly 1 major development per year is still pretty impressive! At the risk of sounding like a redditor 10 years ago, how is he not the modern Tony Stark? Ridiculously wealthy, unrealistically multi-domain, extremely controversial womanizer with outrageously grandiose dreams, extremely petty and lacking in wisdom, highly idealistic, plus significant but not obviously debilitating drug issues.
What kind of unrealistic standard requires one not to ever fail, or not fail several times in succession? Facebook's AI and VR programs have been failures yet they're successful. Google's past is littered with failures, they're infamous for making and abandoning products. But they're still successful. If the media was constantly constructing a 'Google is really fucked this time' narrative, then lots of people would believe it.
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As the ancient saying goes: post shorts.
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