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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.
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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