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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.
I know, that's my point. My entire argument is that he's setting money on fire for gimmicks, and that if said gimmicks won't provide an actual return on investment, the parts of his companies that are bringing in revenue won't be enough to cover for the losses. To that I'm met with an endless stream of "but look at all the launches" arguments, that never actually show said launches are bringing enough profit to bailout projects like Starship, let alone the decline of Tesla.
Even though they're not selling a lot of hardware, they still need to make a lot of it to maintain the service. Starlink satelites have a 5 year lifespan. They need to keep making, and putting them into orbit. If launching them with Falcon was enough to justify the company's existence, I doubt he'd be trying to make Starship the Next Big Thing so quickly.
Correct, this is why I called him "a dead man walking".
Okay, but let me turn the argument around- prove that the launches are not making a profit. You say they are just setting money on fire. I say that is a ridiculously high number of launches to just burn piles of money on, it's an order of magnitude more than their nearest commercial competitor, and if they were not making money there is no way that even Musk could bankroll it. A handful of launches to prove concepts? Sure, its an investment. But you need paying customers within about your first 5 or 10 rockets, and you need to be making money not too long after that.
We have examples of what vanity space companies funded by billionaires look like- Virgin Galactic is one, Blue Origin another. SpaceX does not look very much like these companies. It does look a lot more like actually profitable commercial space launch entities like ULA and ATK, except with what appears to be far superior design and operations.
I professionally walk in aerospace circles, and while I dont work for SpaceX, I've worked with them on some stuff, and they by and large come off as an incredibly serious, cost-focused entity. Far more so than even "legacy space" they are beating the pants off of at the moment.
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