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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.
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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