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People were saying that about Tesla, and he was doing well for a while, and then he started promising goofy stuff like autonomous cars, robo taxis, electric trucks of various sizes, and humanoid robots, got absolutely nowhere with either of these things, and then got overtaken by the competition. xAI can't even keep up with it's competition from the start, and is a giant money pit that can plausibly sink SpaceX all on it's own. The only company that remotely fits your description is SpaceX itself because of how much more they launch than other providers, and I'll just repeat " $41.3 billion in accumulated losses" as a response.
I just remembered that I considered adding a "lessons learned" section where I also mention a few things that happened, which made me think that I was originally too harsh on Elon, but when I read stuff like this I figure I need to double down on negative coverage to compensate for the lalaland sci-fi predictions.
Which is the only company that I was describing.
Which is the same trajectory, Elon is willing to double down on black. SpaceX isn't down $41.3 Billion because they have failed to invent fundamentally productive technologies. SpaceX is down because Elon is leveraging previously-unimagined technological success into hither-further unimaginable giga-tech. It's possible that this blows up the company.
But Elon did invent the cheapest and most reliable rockets in the world, and this is a trillion-dollar industry at worst, and SpaceX has a huge moat it will take competitors years to cross. This is not la-la-land, even something as simple as continuous real-world weather monitoring and crop data is worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. How much is the internet worth? How much is it worth to have a near-monopoly on access to servicing ~3.5 Billion people? The entire world can be connected now, you don't have to build and maintain physical cables in inaccessible locations, you just need a few hundred dollars for a Starlink receiver. What's the bear case? That the schizos were right and global population is dramatically overestimated? That there's no economic value in putting the rest of Africa on the net? It seems to me like the market is so large that not even xAI could sink it.
The best argument remains that perhaps Elon is too unstable and his competitors will reap the boring rewards of actually making money while he chases a car he can't catch. But that case has to confront the fact that -- we somehow got here, didn't we?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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