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Feel free. Like I said the first time, my bets / opinions on Musk are not based on expertise, and I hope I didn't come off as pretending that they are. In fact, part of my shtick nowadays is proving the superiority of Vibe Analysis over deliberate reasoning, so I suppose my ignorance only works to prove my point here.
Well, if you want to bet, I'll be more than happy to give you 3:1 odds on this one. Even if it's smooth sailing from here on out, I don't know if they'll make a go for it. No one asked him to go to Mars, it's Elon's own personal dream, there's no money in it. OTOH he does have a contract for going to the moon, and his investors might want to see a better return on Starlink, and the things that have to be achieved before he gets beyond LEO make it so that "smooth sailing" is far from guaranteed. I want to see how that orbital refuelling works out, and if it handles boil-off well enough that it doesn't turn out they underestimated the amount of necessary launches by a factor of 2-3x.
Finally, there's the competition and the political risks. If Bezos swipes the moon from under Elon, the investors could very well say they're done here. If the competition can provide a tolerable alternative for Starlink, at least for the Pentagon, and the Dems win the next election, they'll stop at nothing to fuck him over.
Ah, but the catch is that most of the other sides of your bets (myself included) are probably likewise using motivated reasoning, not deliberate reasoning. "Elon Time" has been a thing since at least Falcon Heavy (announced Apr 2011, first launch planned by end 2013, first launch accomplished Feb 2018, 82/32 months = 156% schedule slip). BFR announcement was Sep 2017 with first unmanned Mars launch planned by Nov 2022, so that'd just make the 2031 launch window after the same magnitude slip, and it's a much harder challenge so expecting the same level of slip should probably be a best-case scenario not a median-case.
Would you take $33 of mine to a charity of your choice vs $100 of yours to a charity of mine? (Probably just Givewell or a top pick of theirs) Official judgement based on whether there's a Starship-derived upper stage en route to Mars by July 2029 (if they're running late SpaceX might try some kind of Hail Mary pass after the best of the launch window has passed) but more likely February 2029 if they launch something on time, or I'll call it at the end of 2028 if they clearly have zero plans to launch anything. Yeah, I just figured out that "33%" was motivated reasoning on my part, but if we keep the bet small enough to just rub my face in a loss then I'd be in anyway.
IMHO part of why SpaceX has been a success and e.g. Blue Origin (with more investment and a head-start) hasn't yet is that Musk's employees implicitly asked him to go to Mars. At some point I guess people were willing to work crazy hours at SpaceX for barely-competitive wages because the stock options made up for it, but at least in the beginning the only thing SpaceX offered employees was the promise of being able to just get important things done, not to just eventually co-chair a committee to review the recommendation to change the color of the book of regulations against doing things. The list of "first privately-funded X" (liquid rocket to orbit, spacecraft recovery, ISS, GEO, humans to orbit) and then "first X" (booster landing, ocean booster landing, rocket with a 120-launch success streak) and "most powerful X" (operational rocket, rocket), while Constellation and SLS were turning into dead ends, keeps the dream alive. If SpaceX ever pulls a bait-and-switch on that, and just focus on e.g. Starlink as a cash cow while ignoring Mars, eventually their best people will go elsewhere and they'll rot Boeing-style from the inside out.
At this point SpaceX is the investor, buying back $500M of their own shares last year, and at the rate Starlink is growing (7 million subscribers now, up from 6 million in June and 5 million in Feb) they're not likely to change that soon. They're still letting employees sell their shares to outside investors too, but AFAIK the last time they issued new shares for investment was Jan 2023.
The existing investors could turn on Musk, and I'd expect a shareholder lawsuit if he gets Spruce Goose "the next Starship will be made out of wood!" crazy, but right now he's still reportedly got the majority of voting shares, and "we're mad because the company that's been talking about going to Mars for decades is going to Mars" probably wouldn't even make it past a Delaware court.
I'm hoping the competition can provide a tolerable alternative, but so far the best out there is Kuiper, 100 satellites launched (out of a planned 3236), half via the cancelled Atlas V rocket and the other half via Falcon 9. Even with Falcon launches, Kuiper has an upcoming July 2026 deadline to launch the first half of their constellation, and I don't think they're going to make it. Hopefully Trump is still pissy enough at Musk that his FCC will waive the "may result in Kuiper’s authorization being reduced to the number of satellites in use on the milestone date" consequences.
Plus, the competition isn't even yet proposing an alternative for Starshield. SpaceX had put up several hundred commercial satellites and begun paid service before they even started putting up the military sats.
I guess there's still a lot of time between now and the next administration. New Glenn isn't even planning to launch its first KuiperSat load until "mid-2026", but by 2029 they could really be in business. There's not a lot of time between the next inauguration and the subsequent launch window, though. If SpaceX actually is prepping for a Mars launch in February 2029, I'd be astonished if the Dem's "First 100 Days" list in January 2029 was topped by "1. From Hell's Heart, We Stab At Him."
It's not so much motivated reasoning as trusting your gut, and a big part of making your gut reliable is being able to tell the difference between what you think is true, and what you want to be true. While at this point I do have some ego invested in this, I think being right would be worse for me than being wrong. All I win if I'm right is an ego boost, but I lose one of the biggest social media platforms that single-handedly turned the socio-political tide away from a thousand years of darkness that I was foreseeing. If l'm wrong all I lose is some ego, but gain the ability to go on a moon fly-by cruise, or some crazy shit like this.
Now you may say that your decision is also not motivated, and you're just trusting your gut. That's fine, may the best gut win.
It's not about "Elon Time", it's about "Elon Hype". The problem with the Hyperloop wasn't the timing, it was that the idea was retarded. Same with the Cybertruck. The Boring Company might have been cool, if it actually delivered super-cheap tunnels, but I don't think they really outperformed anyone on the matter of costs. Tesla has a whole bunch of products in the pipeline now that were announced as revolutionary, just as the Cybertruck was, and are likely tu suffer a similar fate. A Robotaxi that needs a worker constantly holding his hand at an emergency shutdown trigger is no Robotaxi. This stuff is going to keep repeating with FSD, Cybercab, Semi, and Optimus.
Now maybe, just maybe, SpaceX still has the mojo, but I'm not counting on it.
Yeah, that's my preferred way of dealing with it as well, for privacy reasons.
That's an interesting take, I suppose it would explain why he keeps making these "Mars update" speeches. OTOH, I don't think there's a lot things that could demotivate you more, as working for someone who keeps promising insane achievements are just around the corner, while being the grunt charged with actually achieving them, and who knows exactly how far away you actually are from it. Ask me how I know.
That kinda makes me think that the buyback was about maintaining control, rather than any sort of investment (and strictly speaking, how could it be otherwise? They've spent money that could have gone on development, in order to buy paper).
Isn't that underperforming relative to what was promised to investors? I think I heard the somewhere it should have been 20 million by now.
We've got a deal, then! See you in 2029 (other geopolitical events, the existence of TheMotte, etc, willing). Want to let me know a "default" charity pick for if and when you win, in case I can't track you down then?
In an estimate from ten years ago, when they were trying to round up a bunch of investment at a $12B valuation? Yeah, they're behind that schedule, but it's hardly a promise. Investors who want a promise 10 years out are currently happy to buy T-bills at 4.25%. Probably some investors gave up during the latest ($400B valuation) buyback, and have had to dry their tears with wads of $50s instead of $100s.
That said, I'm not a SpaceX investor (except indirectly via Alphabet) and don't plan to be; I'm just refuting the idea that they're dependent on continuing investment for continuing R&D funding. Their investment over their whole history appears to be less than their revenue in 2024 alone.
Right now it would either be Genspect or Themis Resource Fund, I think the latter should stay relevant even if, god willing, the whole trans mania finally blows over. If not, some kind of uncucked Free Software org, but I don't have specific recommendations here, since they tend to be subject to corporate and progressive takeovers.
You?
I'll say Helen Keller International; if for some reason I win but neither they nor I are around then go ahead and take your pick of Free Software orgs.
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