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That what he has doesn't scale, and what he has is currently maintained by investors / borrowed cash. That Starship isn't "unimaginable giga-tech", it's necessary for the whole thing to not collapse (this certainly seems to be the impression Elon himself has).
I don't know man, I don't know how to have a conversation with someone so high on hype. Make a specific prediction within a reasonable time frame, as in the past, I'll be happy to put my name on the other side of it. That's the only way I found I can have a productive conversation on the topic.
High on hype? Come on, make an argument. My argument is bounded by the theory that the US Government will bail out SpaceX in the worst case because it's important to a generation of American military power, and that SpaceX will be extremely economically productive in the medium case because -- blah blah blah I'm repeating myself. Did you even read what I wrote? It was actually pretty measured.
Do you disagree that continuous satellite imagery and communications servers (already proven technologies) represent huge industries? Why does an email from five years ago give you the impression that Elon thinks it's all going to collapse? (And despite the real problems they are having, they are producing more Starship Raptor engines now than they were at the time of Elon's email.)
I've given you a get-out-of-flail-plea card by noting that Elon could bet the company on yet-unrealized tech that becomes vaporware. You could have just agreed with that. The point you raised instead is a prediction from Elon that SpaceX would go out of business if something that wouldn't happen, didn't happen. SpaceX still hasn't gone out of business. In fact, quite the opposite recently.
My bet is that SpaceX is undervalued and its stock will rise. Tell me where you think it will be in ~2 years.
I think "it's not scaleable" is an argument. It might be wrong, but it's an argument.
I haven't a clue.
Because he said they need to launch an enhanced version of Starlink, and that the Falcon 9 is unable to do it, and because they have not been launching these enhanced Starlinks with Starship, or in any other way (to my knowledge).
You zeroed in on exactly the kind of bet I don't want to make. Stonk prices are irrational. Tesla is worth more than all other auto makers combined, and has delivered nothing that would justify that valuation, why would it be different for SpaceX? If I thought I could predict stock price movements, I wouldn't be making bets with internet people, I would be speculating on the stock market.
Objectively, as a matter of fact, it's already scaling. The last five years have put almost as many satellites in space as the previous fifty years put together, and SpaceX is responsible for
50% of that. Starlink has10k satellites already and only 12 million customers. And SpaceX has been growing its launch capacity every year. This is already enough to make SpaceX an enormous pile of money.Because of Starship delays SpaceX configured the v2 Mini in 2023 and has since launched thousands of them on Falcon 9. v2 has ~4x the capacity of the old v1.5. SpaceX is not on the verge of bankruptcy but has grown its core business, and your information is five years out of date. This is a classic case of Elon promising impossible deadlines and catastrophizing doom if they don't materialize, failing, and in the process achieving huge success that is beyond what anyone else in the industry thought was possible.
So what?
I do acknowledge that Elon's companies have benefited from an enormous amount of hype. But this is priced in. There is a lot of money betting that this is all smoke and vapor and there is even more money betting that it's not. That's how markets work.
Name a different bet then. Satellites in orbit by 2028? Launches? Payload sizes? Cost per launch? Starlink capacity? Everything is going up.
Tesla is worth that much because it might disrupt the entire auto industry. Cars turned out to be worth more than horses. Tesla's valuation prices in the Expected Value of what would happen if fleets of self-driving cars fundamentally remake society.
But SpaceX is also different from Tesla because it has already demonstrated trillion-dollar technologies. SpaceX's valuation prices in its total dominance over an entirely new economic sector.
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The democrats are going to get back in office at some point, and they are almost certainly going to try to permanently remove Musk's access to anything resembling wealth or power when they do so. This creates an obvious avenue for generating a fiscal crisis for SpaceX correlated with an obvious obstacle for the sort of bailout you're suggesting. At a minimum, I would expect a "bailout" under such conditions to require the removal of Musk and all Musk loyalists from the company's leadership, and the installation of people deemed politically reliable. I would expect such a "bailout" to effectively destroy the company.
Interesting that you can see the case for the collapse of SpaceX, but not the implosion of the Democratic Party as a nationally competitive entity. The national party is losing the fundraising race badly
The Dems next top prospect for President is apparently caught up in a corruption probe. Their bench is critically thin.
Whilst the GOP can always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they've got a better talent pool in the near term. This seems like an even-odds bet at best.
The Democratic Party will simply be supplanted by the Democratic Socialists of America, which will inherit all its NPCs but none of its scandals.
The DSA will be uncompetitive nationally- woke capital is woke capital which the DNC relies on. Squad candidates win only in deep blue districts and the machines democrats rely on aren’t too enthusiastic about them.
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I am fairly confident that our current democratic party is well-positioned to outlive America as a coherent sociopolitical entity.
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This is misleading. Dems funnel all their money from billionaires and foreigners through assorted informal and dark money webs. Expect them to outspend Reps anyway.
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The immolation of the Democratic Party and the rise of Zohran Mamdani Thought would be a development not necessarily in Elon's favor.
A two year long wiretap campaign that hasn't led to anything on Newsom. At this point if you aren't being investigated by the Justice Department you are simply not a viable presidential candidate.
Zohran Mamdani thought is an electoral winner when it has a uniquely talented politician leading it and it's running in a deep blue progressive city. The squad loses badly elsewise.
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I don't know about that. I don't think these south Asian "socialists" are quite what they portray themselves as, and people like Elon might end up getting along just fine with them. See also: Trump.
He might. Of course, he might also get along with a future Democratic admin, as he did in the past.
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While I know this is possible and is widely perceived as plausible by many, I think the chances of this are overrated. In order:
Destroying SpaceX would be among the most dramatic uses of federal power in American history, it would be like creating the Chinese system out of whole cloth overnight. I think a likelier scenario is that Elon is personally targeted in a kind of Trump-like show trial that avoids really destroying him but gives lots of politicians lots to say. Or that SpaceX is targeted by hostile and bad-faith investigations that make it bleed but not bleed out. Because, ultimately, actually destroying SpaceX would damage the foundations of American military power and American capitalism. I guess it's always possible. But this is such a bad outcome that I think people are severely underestimating how much power the Democrats would have to have to pull it off.
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Yeah, I hate this. If this is how it pans out I will not claim credit for any of the predictions.
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The route to stopping Musk for a Democratic president and majority is getting harder. Unlike Tesla where it’s possible they could lean on institutional shareholders to pressure him out (although they’d be very loathe to do so given it would tank the price), Musk has a supermajority of SpaceX voting rights. They could try to use the SEC to force him out of management, defense production acts to take control of operations etc but they would be stayed by a conservative fifth circuit judge, then blocked by SCOTUS, especially this SCOTUS. So they’d have to pack the court first, which requires abolishing the filibuster, which would make some on the center squeamish, etc etc. There’s also no real competition in a lot of places eg Starlink, NASA contracts are so long term they’re hard to change quickly. I assume they’d try to fund competitors, maybe offer generous tax breaks or state funding or exploratory contracts, but they couldn’t actually replace them, not quickly. They can investigate him for DOGE actions, securities law violations etc but I expect Trump will give him a blanket pardon for everything that he ever did in his entire life up until January 20th 2029 when he leaves office.
I'm told that it's difficult to run a trillion-dollar company from prison, even white-collar Club Fed. They might have to find something he did on January 21st, but that shouldn't be too much of an obstacle.
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"harder" is not "impossible" or even "sufficiently hard to successfully deter the motivated", and it seems to me that the Democrats and Blue Tribe generally are at this point highly motivated.
Packing the court is likely to happen soon in any case.
Loss of actual capabilities is not a significant obstacle; the federal government is very comfortable wallowing in infrastructure and technology mediocrity for indefinite periods of time.
I would not be comfortable betting my freedom and well-being on Presidential Pardons being the norm that shall forever stand, but I'll grant that a pardon is likely and should offer at least some protection short-term.
What would be the obstacle to a federal wealth tax aimed exclusively at trillionaires?
And of course, straightforward murder is always an option.
I don't see how a court packing does not signal the beginning of the end of the US - much like if Pence would have tried to appoint Trump president during the electors issue.
The Dems would have to lock out the Reps from power for at least a generation or face a retaliatory court pack the second the Reps return to power - and then we repeat the cycle until we all get bored of the 51% beating the 49% with sticks.
Each side packing the court each time they get power - SCOTUS rulings become meaningless. We become increasingly banana republic like.
Maybe I am dooming too hard though at the prospect?
Court-packing would spell the end of SCOTUS, but not the end of the US. Probably, in fact, just the end of Marbury v Madison.
SCOTUS ceases to exist as an independent Constitutional authority if it can be packed by the partisans at will. But there are still lots of constraints at play. Court-packing requires the President and Senate be of the same party, which is not a given at all. It also only erodes the Court's credibility on highly contentious political questions. There remain lots of boring technical matters that fall outside the purview of party politics, even if everything today is a political issue. That work will remain even if the Court's ability to declare laws Constitutional and Unconstitutional is practically ceded to the other two branches. This is probably more in line with how the Founders envisioned the court in the first place. SCOTUS reduced to a rubber stamp on Constitutional matters effectively loses the power it gained in Marbury v Madison. But it would still be the Supreme Court and the highest court of appeal on all sorts of other matters.
So otherwise we're back to electoral constraints. And short of actual civil war destroying one party or the other, Democrats and Republicans will both maintain enough power in enough places that new power-limiting arrangements will probably emerge.
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We have pretty clearly initiated the beginning of the end of the US some years ago, arguably with the election of Trump in 2016.
Obviously, and this is pretty clearly the plan, at least arguably on both sides. Blues and Reds do not share sufficient compatibility of values to make cooperation possible, so the only remaining options are separation or war. Legacy social institutions obstruct these natural solutions, and so we observe the culture war blastwave striking, bending, and blowing out those institutions in sequence as it propagates through society. SCOTUS won't be able to hold it back any more than Free Speech Principles or Liberalism or the Courts or Academia was; things made by humans can be unmade by other humans.
There have been worse presidents than Trump, by and large our institutions have held against his efforts to get around them. He'll be gone in a little over two and a half years. No successor to him has been really able to gain any kind of traction to his cult of personality. The US is able to handle the bumpy road of a bad presidency, SCOTUS court packing is a different animal as there is no foreseeable end it to.
If it was the plan on the right, they'd court pack now, but they haven't - they won't even kill the filibuster for the SAVE act. I'd suggest both sides want to win, but that is different than locking the other out of power through court packing, killing the filibuster, adding US states, etc.
We have been in worse culture war situations than now. Cooler heads must prevail.
When you begin packing the court, the constitution becomes useless - as it only matters what SCOTUS says it does. Fundamental rights could oscillate as quickly as every four years, that is not an environment for a stable society. The last time court packing happened was right after the civil war - I'd suggest that is where it should stay.
Is the current GOP really any more a "Cult" than the Democrats are at this stage?
While I would not underestimate the GOP's penchant for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, they appear to have a clear path forwards. Assuming that the political apparatus that Rubio and Co. have spent the last decade and a half building will simply evaporate the moment Trump exits stage right seems presumptuous.
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They failed at imprisoning Trump and most of his close associates, though.
This is true, and as a consequence Trump is currently President. This does not mean that a decisive Blue Tribe victory is not possible, nor that significant effort will not be expended (and norms/cohesion burned) in pursuit of such a victory.
It does not appear to me that we are off the escalation spiral.
Trump's lack of imprisonment- and that of his close associates- is not due to lack of trying.
Could you elaborate your point? Is it that they've tried and failed, and so are likely to try more in future, or that they've tried and failed, and so are unlikely to succeed in the future?
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There's no need to be in power for that.
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He would challenge it as a targeted tax under bill of attainder rules since the population of trillionaires is just him and an arbitrary wealth threshold doesn’t cleanly constitute a class (the way a president does), and the courts (again, right-leaning circuit and then SCOTUS) would stay the tax as unconstitutional.
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How about the FAA or the EPA? I'm pretty sure someone creative could fish out a few other letters out of the soup to screw him over with.
Any regulatory action will be stayed by a friendly Texas circuit judge and then blocked by SCOTUS as it would be (a) trivially obviously politically motivated and (b) a 5-4 or 6-3 vote along ideological lines. They’re also federal agencies so Trump’s inevitable pardon will be more effective. The big risk would be state level enforcement but Musk moves the corporate registration to Texas so even California and NY are pretty limited and it’s likely things would go the way the anti-Trump cases did under Biden except Musk will be able to hole up in Texas while Trump wanted to be able to campaign everywhere and had a lot more assets under (ultimately) his name in NY.
I don’t think you actually need to do any of this for Musk. Flatter him and call him a genius and say you’re in favor of UBI and other stuff he supports and he’ll be fine with you. His politics have flipped before and they can again when convenient.
Why? Even under Trump Starship is grounded (don't know if this is still valid, but didn't see any news calling it off). A hostile administration could launch these sort of investigations more often, and slow-walk them, how would that be blocked and overturned as unconstitutional?
"More often" from a future FAA would stick out like a sore thumb. FAA investigations into SpaceX failures are already done as often as reasonable, out of a proper abundance of caution. A year ago they grounded Falcon briefly after a booster landing burn failure, not because there was any possible danger from that, but because seeing anything unexpected with a rocket engine at any point suggested the possibility of something unexpected happening in the future at an actually-dangerous point.
But this could be pretty damaging. IIRC that Falcon grounding only lasted days. The difficulty with slow-walking is that in these cases it's SpaceX itself doing the real investigation work and the FAA reviewing the findings when they're done, and it'd be hard to sell "we need 4 months to read what took you a month to discover and write" as legitimate. They'd have to go all-out and get a hostile legislator to change the system entirely, to sell "They're just investigating themselves!? We need our people doing the investigation if we're going to protect the American People!" Achieve that and you wouldn't even need to give instructions to slow-walk anything; friction and incentives would do it for you.
The more plausible failure mode is just that SpaceX writes a report, the FAA looks at it, and then says "more", rinse and repeat. That's a really common failure mode for environmental law, but the FAA (generally through DAR/DER) is pretty well-known for it, too.
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