"For context, 200 companies in the S&P 500 had more revenue last year than did SpaceX. This includes Tesla, whose sales were five times higher."
But Tesla is "selling" cybertrucks to SpaceX.
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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You don't say!
And it even mentioned the hot air balloon Tesla which is overvalued by at least a factor of 10 of not 100
I've been saying this for years already; all Elmo Musk companies are bullshit companies
SpaceX got 3 billion dollars to get the US to the moon. They burned through that and got zero results. Those shit starship rockets barely reach LEO empty, and they never got any of the other hardware ready. If I do that, I'd go to jail for theft or something, but here? Meh....
Repeat after me: Elmo Musk is a command, every word out of his mouth is a lie, and that is how he got rich. Well, Lucky with rich parents, lucky with a company buy out, and lying lying lying
Explains the subscription drive they’ve been putting on at Starlink. Multiple tiers, a price increase, and free hardware.
X and xAI should be considered gross violations of fiduciary responsibility.
Anthropoc committing $1.5 billion a month is neat. Do they even have that in revenue yet? Or is it another bullshit AI accounting trick.
In any case, SpaceX’s datacentre is a polluting nightmare. https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
All of these supposed deals between these “ai” companies are theoretical handshake “deals” that they’re magically claiming as revenue when no actual money changes hands.
SpaceX would absolutely remain private if they had the option. Elon said a million times that he regrets taking Tesla public and intended to keep SpaceX private forever to avoid investor scrutiny and pesky government regulations.
The only reason they are going public is to pass on the debt to stupid investors, because they don’t have any more money after folding in two loser companies in a last-ditch effort to keep them afloat. Once public, it wouldn’t surprise me if Tesla and SpaceX magically announce a merger, given that only one of those companies makes money (for now).
Oh for sure. I hope Ed Zitron unpacks it. I don’t care enough to figure out the bullshit.
Musk has a horrible track record of accomplishment. He attracts moron boomer investors like flies to shit.
My understanding is that Anthro is paying all this money to musk because they didn’t go crazy with speculative purchasing like openai did.
Anthro waited until they had users and subscriptions (and money) and now that they’ve got these and are trying to meet demand, xAI are one of the only games in town with lots of idle capacity (I guess due to the fact that grok is an unwanted step child lol).
Anthro waited until they had users and subscriptions (and money) and now that they’ve got these
They are incinerating investor cash at a slightly less absurd rate than OpenAI, but make no mistake that they are the opposite of profitable.
Huh, I thought the SpaceX part of SpaceX was profitable. We all know the goal of Starlink was to jumpstart a satellite market that required Starship, plus pay for it, but I assumed profit in the regular launching business plus government development contracts
Well I think you're not exactly wrong, the idea to do starlink was definitely about their rockets, but I'd say it was clearly more about falcon 9 than about starship or jump-starting a bigger satellite industry.
First off, starlink works, it's essentially done and it never used the starship to get its satellites to orbit. So in that light, it clearly wasn't about starship because it didn't use it (though it surely will at some point).
But you can just look at what they did with the falcon 9 to see that this was really the reason behind starlink. The thing is, they were designing this reusable rocket and it had never been done before. As a result nobody thought it would work. Nobody trusted it, nobody wanted to put their payload on a rocket they didn't trust, and no banks would insure these payloads as they had low expectations for success. As a result, spaceX could build a reusable booster, but they couldn't get anyone to buy it.
SpaceX was basically left with 2 options: They could continue to launch rockets with no real payload to prove the reliability of their reused boosters, essentially wasting a whole bunch of launches. Or they could create their own payloads to launch, accept the risk themselves, demonstrate that the reusable boosters worked fine, and not waste every launch.
The advantage of taking that second option was that they could continue to iterate and make constant changes and upgrades to their rocket. Normally, making big changes would put your vehicle back into the "untested and untrusted" category, but if they continued to have their own payloads to put up, they could continue to demonstrate its reliability.
I will say though, I think starship is absolutely about jump-starting a larger space industry. I think completely reusable rockets are a necessary first step to any larger, more permanent utilization of space.
But it goes both ways. Starship is about jump starting a much larger space economy, but it also requires a much larger space economy.
Falcon 9 is sufficient for today’s space economy. It already carries 80% by mass of the worlds launches. As the economy gradually grows, it’s easy to see it increment to keep pace, or other companies/countries growing into bigger shares. In this world, starship is a waste of time and money.
But if we get that paradigm shift, suddenly starship is at the center
but it also requires a much larger space economy.
...
In this world, starship is a waste of time and money.
Well I don't think I agree with these statements at all. The thing is, if/when they get starship to work, not only will it be able to lift significantly more mass to orbit than the falcon 9, it will likely be cheaper per launch. Not cheaper per kg to orbit, but cheaper overall than launching a falcon 9 (remember, they need to build a new falcon second stage for each launch). That is such a significant improvement that I'd argue that its development is totally worthwhile even if the demand for launches were to stay stagnant.
And honestly, we definitely need some heavy lift rocket. The Saturn V doesn't exist anymore and the SLS is... economically unrealistic.
Yes but remember there is not currently much that needs that large of a rocket, and you get diminishing returns on rideshare. Major satellites are still likely to need private launches and there’s no point in buying a bigger launching you need.
Large rockets are currently needed
- for space stations - a handful of times total
- manned missions to moon/mars, a few times
- a constellation like Starlink can take more advantage of rideshare
Current space economy has a use for maybe half a dozen launches per year. All that money developing re-use, building multiple launches per sites, a lot of the basic technology, is a waste, if that’s all we need.
Making back that excessive development cost, achieving that low launch price, entirely depends on there being sufficient market to launch many times per year. It’ll be revolutionary for sure, but only if
They’ve designed and built for scale, which will be amazing when it happens, but only if we scale dramatically.
I hear you that such a large rocket is not "needed" very often, but it can still be used. I believe the plan is to ramp down falcon 9 production and go to starship launches for everything, even smaller payloads, simply because it's cheaper and more sustainable. As long as they launch regularly, the price should still be lower than falcon 9. And at least on paper, it is more sustainable, burning methane results in cleaner exhaust than burning kerosene, the only major exhaust products are CO2 and water. And not letting an upper stage burn up or fall into the ocean is an ecological plus too.
So things would be going kinda well comparatively if he'd not arbitrarily merged twitter into it?
And even when they float, the shares won't get the power to get rid of the person causing the problem?
This might end up being hilarious
So if we all stop buying Starlink .. the music stops?
Good to know.
By 2027,many countries will have launched alternatives to Starlink. Canada's goes up in the fall.
Honda is now launching recyclable rockets.
Europe too.
SpaceX will end up like Tesla, losing out to better competition.
Unlikely, he's been running it a loss for years now, propped up by his money, his billionaire mates' money and some launch contracts in addition to Starlink.
This is the reason he's building in terms into the IPO that prevent him being ousted - public companies making losses are at risk of board shakeups, he's making sure that isn't possible before the float launches.
He doesnt care if twitter or spaceX lose money, they're valuable levers to get what he wants
He's not been spending his money, he's been spending vc and govt contract money. And the VC money is drying up, that's why he's opened it up to IPO.
How will that enable his stay in power? I have no clue how stuff like this works.
He will own around 80% of the shares, so he'll have plenty to sell off to enrich himself or use to borrow against down to 50.01% and he maintains control. So he gets a huge influx of cash from the ipo to use and he gains a wider calculation of wealth headed towards being the first trillionaire. This will absolutely put him over the edge into that status.
You're buying starlink?? Better set up your own point to point wifi link
P2MP wireless service is often oversubscribed. Starlink provides competition in the space which has required incumbents to pull up their socks. But anywhere that p2mp is used, fibre could be installed. It’s not got that much range. There’s applications for p2mp but if it’s an ISP, run the fibre.
However, it’s pretty difficult to do p2p wireless to a ship without bouncing through space. There are a lot of really good applications for LEO satellite internet but it is a tragedy that it’s not something humanity can get together to build as a common service, but rather it is the property of a couple billionaires.
Computers and their networks are the new means of production, and private ownership of the means of production has demonstrated to be a blight.
I thought this was common knowledge among in the tech community.
Yeah the whole reason they started starlink was to take in some profit
"Everyone"
xAI made $818M profit this quarter using 200,000 GPUs, if anyone was interested.