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Twitter wasn't meant to be a profitable business. He bought it because it needed reform. He kicked a four digit number of problem employees and greatly improved free speach on the global public square. That is a major achievement.
SpaceX has been the most successful rocket program since the 60s. F9/FH, the dragon capsule have been true game changers. Starship is a complete paradigm shift. It is going to be atleast a decade between Falcon 9 doing a successful landing and anyone else repeating the feat. They made sci fi tech happen. As for starlink they are a global scale ISP with capacity that is several orders of magnitude above everyone else. Starlink is almost profitable as is and has 50% growth per year. There is a lot of potential left with millions of more potential clients. While starship will take several years to get operational it unlocks a giant market as it allows regular cell phone users to send text messages globally and use basic services everywhere in the world.
The launch market has a shortage and the demand is greater than supply. Spacex has costs that are substantially lower than the competition, and demand is growing.
As for Tesla it is probably overvalued but it is in a better position than a lot of legacy car manufacturers. The legacy manufacturers don't have anywhere near the experience with electric cars and face major issues as they have to sunset large portions of their company. Tesla was one of the biggest things to happen to the car industry in decades. Musk became obscenely rich from it. I believe his interest in Tesla will fade away and he will use his Tesla money for other projects.
Tell that to the people who gave him $10 billion in loans to buy it.
Yes, which is why I put it at the top, as the least problematic of his companies. If he could do that after winning Twitter in a lottery, and not having to pay for it, or if there was no advertiser boycott in response, I'd say things have gone quite well for him.
I guess this is another part of the Motte and Bailey that I mentioned - the things he already did already were revolutionary. Ok, cool. Show me how it's paying for their bills, though.
No, it is not. Maybe it will be one day. This is the thing that drives me a bit nuts in discussions about Elon, people are acting like he already achieved what he promised.
The other problem is that "the paradigm", such as it is, falls apart after you want to do anything beyond LEO. 15 refuelling launches to get 1 rocket to the moon is a little bit excessive, wouldn't you say?
What they did was cool, but not mind-blowing. It's not even clear there's much benefit to reusability. In either case, again, show me how that will satisfy the investors.
Can you give a link to breakdown of their numbers? I'd be interested in seeing that.
Growth in itself doesn't necessarily mean much, if you have to keep launching satellites to expand service.
But... most people don't go around to "anywhere in the world", they tend to stick to their local population hub. Their phones tend to already have perfectly fine Internet access, and when they don't, and need a satellite connection, it's not exactly clear why they would be willing to pay more just to get their latency a bit lower.
Again, any links will be appreciated.
This is only a problem, if we're all going to switch to electric cars. I can already tell you I don't want to. The EU played with the idea of forcing people to switch, but even if they go through with it, the Chinese are providing perfectly fine alternatives.
Teslas are still a rarity, and it's not clear how long they will stick around. Their sales numbers have gone down, and they have competition now, so even if electric cars will stay, it's not clear that people will keep buying Teslas.
Yeah, through people buying meme-stocks on the back of wild promises he never fulfilled. Do you think people will see "but Musk got rich from it" as an argument in Elon's favor, if Tesla crashes with no sign of semis, self-driving, robo-taxis, bipedal robots, or revolutionary new batteries?
I don't have a WSJ subscription so I can't confirm the details, but it looks like Starlink turned profitable ~4 years after thet started launching the satellites, which is a pretty crazy turnaround given the massive amount of capital poured into it: https://www.wsj.com/tech/behind-the-curtain-of-elon-musks-secretive-spacex-revenue-growth-and-rising-costs-2c828e2b?page=1
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