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I saw someone semi-jokingly say that the rate limits were increasing as Elon ran into them himself, and at this point I find that distressingly likely.
Man should have stuck to rockets and electric cars, though a more based Twitter is still nice to have.
Consider the idea that he's not actually running the rockets and electric cars any better...
I can't see how SpaceX is anything but an unqualified success in every single way.
As soon as Starship is flying, Musk will have achieved every single goal he had short of the Mars colony, which is likely to happen when the reduced launch costs make it cheap enough for governments beginning to wake up to a space race.
Tesla could be run better, but it's still highly successful and has absolutely achieved Musk's vision of democratizing electric cars, and even if other companies overtake it, they're doing so by adopting the technology themselves.
God damn Starship is going to revolutionize everything. I can't wait.
Same gentleman's bet offer I made to self_made_human: care to make any guesses as to when we see it in orbit? I'll be more than happy to take the opposite side of it.
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Me neither. It would be hella funny if the Artemis astronauts struggled to land on the moon and found a whole platoon of SpaceX people waiting there with airport placards and another tesla roadster haha
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This.
We're living in a world where SpaceX has become the standard to beat for commercial sattelite launches and Ford EV's are licensing Tesla batteries and charging tech. If this is Musk "screwing up" what does "success" look like?
Well, what I'm saying is Elon's companies are part-bubble, and part promises he'll never fulfill. Something being a bubble doesn't mean stuff isn't getting done, failure is more a question of sustainability. For unfulfillable promises it's more obvious - success is when he actually fulfills them.
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Frankly I find Musk to be one of the strongest reasons to doubt general intelligence (which I still believe in). The man is super-effective at running his core enterprises, people who deny SpaceX and Tesla's results seem to me to be in denial of overwhelming evidence. This doesn't stop him from being a goof with terrible takes and a streak of very bad calls, including this whole Twitter nonsense.
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If it's a hype bubble, you're not going to see how it's a failure until it crashes.
Yeah... that's a big if. Care to take a guess when we might see it in orbit? I'll be happy to take the "no it won't" side of that prediction.
My 50% confidence interval is within this year, and 70% within 2 years and 90% within 3 years for the first successful orbital flight and return for a Starship. I haven't actually checked further launch plans before writing this, but I think I can still hold myself to this.
Frankly speaking, I don't see any reason to be anything but bullish on SpaceX. Even if Elon was eaten by a wild doge today, the company has already revolutionized space travel, reusable rockets were as outlandish as fusion power for fucking forever. Starlink is profitable, and even the humble Falcon and Falcon Heavy have made lunar exploration feasible on post-Cold War budgets.
Ok, I'm going "no way" on all 3. The one in 3 years might surprise me, but for the sake of simplicity I'll round it down to "not going to happen". And I'm talking about simply going to orbit, if it successfully lands, I'll be shocked.
That's just not true. Others will point out that the actual innovative thing is making reusability cost-effective. We've seen reusability as a "mere" technical feat working for decades in the form of Space Shuttle.
Is it? I seem to remember a leaked email where Elon was complaining about Starlink's financials.
Are you serious? The only example in the entire history of rocketry of cost effective reusable rockets is SpaceX's Falcon 9. Other companies have caught up after 10 years by copying their design. If anyone can do it, it's Gwynn Shotwell.
Have I been hallucinating the Space Shuttle all this time?
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Well, the whole crux of the issue is making reusability profitable! That's what people really mean by that statement, or at least I do.
You can make the claim that fusion power exists today, except it costs more to get energy than you can sell it for. But nobody claims that we've "got" fusion power do they?
The Space Shuttle was a flying white elephant swollen with pork, too compromised from it's original vision to satisfy anyone except horny Texan senators. Same deal with SLS, though it doesn't even pretend to be reusable. It would be cheaper to fuel the Starship with dollar bills or just pile them to the Moon (this is hyperbole).
I find such a claim dubious, and it's more likely Elon kvetching even if it's true.
It is such a stunningly superior product to any other orbital internet provider that it's ludicrous. And they have massive positive feedback from the experience curve of having so many launches on hardware they own.
It's not like anyone is forcing them to do it, if it wasn't profitable or on the road to profit with massive growth they simply wouldn't do it.
No, I don't think you can make the claim. For one, a "power generator" that consumes more power than it generates is not a "power generator". A proper analogy would be a working fusion reactor generating a surplus, but being more expensive than any other available energy source. We don't have that. Secondly, every single fusion reactor test I heard of ran a couple seconds, and that was it. If we had something that could run reliably for days (even if it consumed energy on net), I could accept the analogy.
And then there's the small issue that I don't buy his reusability actually makes it cheaper. I asked someone else in the thread for a cost break down, have you seen one? I even searched for it today, but I can't find anything.
I dunno, I've seen people overstate the Shuttle's cost by taking the cost of the entire program (including infrastructure), and dividing by the amount of launches. From what I understand it was underwhelming compared to savings expectations, but it was a pretty solid craft.
Here's the story for anyone curious, but sure might be a hoax I guess.
How does that matter? Very few people need orbital internet. Cable or mobile does just fine, and probably better.
What if by "simply not doing it" they'd have nothing to do, therefore no hype in the media, and therefore had a lot more trouble raising money from investors?
No, it's not "very few people" who benefit from satellite internet, or even if the number meets your standard for very few, the ones who do are significantly wealthy and able to pay for it.
A quick Google shows 1.5 million subscribers.
Starlink is very popular in rural America and Australia where previously getting 1-10 mbps for 5-10 times the money and tiny data caps were the norm.
It is also incredibly useful out at sea, and the commercial users such as cruise ships are happy to pay tens of thousands at a minimum when the quality of service blows everything else out of the water. Not to mention the military applications, as so clearly shown in Ukraine.
I don't put much weight in that hypothesis, even if I grant it's possible.
If that was the case, they'd aim more for a minimum viable product deal instead of launching as many as the FTC will let them.
Commercial viability requires a high Q for the fusion process, but that's necessary and not sufficient in itself. It certainly can't be profitable if it uses more electricity than it produces.
SpaceX is so much cheaper than all of the other launch providers it's not even funny anymore. And it takes that degree of outright embarrassment for the entrenched interests in the US legislature to tolerate it taking away their NASA pork money.
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Tesla is worth over 800 billion so he has certainly done something right there. To your point it is pretty crazy that the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world is a full blown/terminally online twitter addict.
No I think this makes sense. The thing he did right was hype. With hype he attracted people good enough at the actual work to make a functional company, and enough funding to get it of the ground. At least functional enough to generate more hype. But 90% of what he personally is doing right is the hype. He has a ton of projects that didn't really go anywhere, but did generate even more hype, like hyperloop (heh. Hype-rloop). So of course he's terminally on Twitter. He's a PR CEO. He does Hype and Culture War and it makes his stock increase in value.
I'm not going to say he's a bad CEO in the getting funding and making his stock value rise sense. I'm not even going to say his pure Hype strategy hasn't been working, it's been causing all sorts of forces to gas him up like a DND deity powered by faith. But like- he's casting with Charisma, not Int. If his company is really worth 800 billion, its because he can be expected to generate enough hype to get other people to pump energy into his ideas until they become reality- I don't think it would be worth that in anyone else's hands though.
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It's not that crazy, considering that the US already had a full blown Twitter addict as a President.
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That's actually an argument against him. There's no way Tesla is worth more than all other car companies combined.
So how much money have you lost shorting Tesla for years at this point?
I think Tesla’s valuation is high because (1) they do have a reasonably high margin car department, (2) they basically now have a national gas station chain as all other electric vehicles are using the Tesla charging stations, and (3) the hope that Tesla can solve battery storage turning them into the world’s largest utility by far.
The valuation obviously is based off of hope, but there is real substance and actual profit. Elon built a car company in the 21st century. People thought that impossible. Maybe we don’t assume he is an idiot?
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There is very much a way because thats currently what it is.
Are you saying Elon is a bad CEO because the market places such a high valuation on Tesla?
Nah, stock market prices can get wild, and end up not indicative of actual value of the company.
Not directly, but sort of yes. It's more that when a company's valuation is so out of whack with it's fundamentals, it's a good indication the company is running on pure hype, and when that happens it's not uncommon for companies to crash and burn when the hype runs out.
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SpaceX succeded with things where many others failed, did things considered basically impossible and Musk's takes on spaceflight seems to make more sense.
Maybe simply "disregard common opinion, order company to do weird stuff because you thing that it is a good idea and double down on everything" worked in case of SpaceX and imploded in case of Twitter? After all such strategy cannot work every time?
Or Musk started to believe fanboys, thinks he is smarter than God himself and stopped listening to others? Or is surrounded by bunch of sycophants?
Or for Twitter there is no way for profitability and task is impossible and Musk flails trying to achieve it?
A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.
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What was that, reusability? Other people have done it, the only question is whether it makes sense. People always point to how much the costs to orbit have fallen, but I'm not sure I buy it's because of reusability. He also does some interesting things with accounting, like overcharging governments by 2-3 times, and with that I wonder if the private launches aren't just subsidized by government contracts.
Of all the companies I would have expected it to work, it was Twitter. There's no way they needed all the people they were hiring, so trimming the fat was a good move. Alternative sources of funding like Blue, and letting people put tweets behind a paywall was a pretty good idea. Maybe it was the advertiser boycott, maybe Twitter was in a lot worse shape at the time of purchase than anyone let on, but as good as his initial ideas were, it seems they're not enough.
As someone with a slight amount of tech knowledge (10 years of experience) my reading of the situation was that he was totally correct that there was a lot of fat that needed to be cut - but the problem was that the fat was heavily contributing to keeping twitter on one side of the culture war even as they let technical debt accumulate to absurd levels. He is facing an avalanche of negative press and stories because not only has he threatened to make Twitter a place where dissenting opinions can exist at all, but also because he just made a whole swathe of social justice jobs evaporate. Even if they don't get explicit about it, I believe that activists understand on a basic level that someone demonstrating you don't need to pay their cultural commissars in money or do-nothing sinecures is a real, serious threat to their movement and way of life. If you're a diversity officer who helps people deal with micro-aggressions at Meta, you REALLY don't want to see Elon fire everyone with a job that looks remotely like yours and then have the company do better as a result - so you lean on the advertisers and government connections, make sure the legacy media savages them, make them an acceptable target for mockery, etc.
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The problem with this argument is that SpaceX still charges the government significantly less than ULA (i.e. Lockheed and Boeing) do.
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Yes. Or more specifically, reusability that reduces costs unlike space shuttle failed attempt.
And some smaller changes that resulted in overall reduced costs.
Starting and running private company building brand new rocket is also really unique achievement. Also human spaceflight as private profitable company.
Not in way that makes sense. Space shuttle was a major prior attempt and ended more expensive than disposable rockets.
Well, they still launch cheaper than competition or launch at all. It is hard to say how much overcharging is here, given that almost all activity in this space is governmental.
There is possibility that Twitter was fundamentally unprofitable or that Musk is worse fit, or that he started to believe that he is perfect and makes no mistakes.
Is there an official breakdown of costs on Falcon 9, showing that they are actually saving money on reusability?
Not aware of anything so detailed (and would be happy to read it!) though not saving on that just means that they managed to
In theory they may run with the same rocket costs and less bloated company and/or less outrageous profits than ULA etc, but it also would be impressive.
There's also:
I guess that scam of that size would be also quite impressive, though fairly unlikely.
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I feel like all of the above applies in the case of Twitter.
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Damn that's actually a scary point. Not just for the rocket/car users themselves but also for the rest of humanity considering that he's 100% the best in those areas at the moment.
Consider that, this too, is not the case.
Look, I appreciate the ethos Musk represents, but that's also the main reason I'm so critical of him. If this guy crashes and burns, which I find likely, the ideas he represents are going to get discredited.
As long as the rockets continue to fly, and land, and the competitors continue to largely not do that, or do that plainly worse, at some point you're asking me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes.
I don't believe in ideas, I believe in dollars per kg to orbit.
All I'm asking for is some skepticism of his accounting, surely that's not too much of a stretch?
It is a bigger and bigger stretch as time goes on. If SpaceX were losing money on each commercial flight, you would expect them to minimize the number of those flights and attempt to maximize the number of government flights. Instead, they are turning down almost no commercial partners and have increased launch cadence every year, to the point that they are putting more commercial tons into orbit than everyone else in the world combined, and growing. This would not make sense if it were not profitable for them. You believe they are burning investor capital to do this...why, exactly?
The government overcharge theory doesn't make sense either, because even if they are inflating their bids, they are still beating all competitors and managing to deliver. They could only do this if their costs are unusually low by industry standards. But if that is true, then it is also true that their commercial costs world be lower, so the lower price for those would also be profitable.
The more parsimonious explanation is just that their costs actually are lower, which makes them more profitable at market clearing prices and enables then to discount the market price without losing money.
The same reason Ponzi or Madoff did?
Is that actually true? I think I heard about a case recently where the government didn't even consider alternatives to SpaceX.
Also, I'm pretty sure their overcharging is documented in some cases. I think the Starlinks for Ukraine carried 3x their market price.
I don't follow. Ponzi and Madoff had a clear plan: take a bunch of peoples' money, then don't deliver what you promised, and keep the money. SpaceX is taking investment money, but they are also delivering what they promised, and more. It's hard to see how you stand to gain by actually spending the money you planned to pilfer on providing goods and services to others.
A more plausible theory might be trying to do what Uber or other companies have attempted: burn investment capital long enough to become the near-monopolist in a particular market, then raise prices to achieve massive profits. In some senses, Tesla followed that model to a degree. In the case of SpaceX however, it seems less likely because (a) they haven't actually raised their prices despite capturing the lion's share of the commercial market and (b) most of their competitors are government agencies or government-guaranteed providers who can't be driven out of business this way in any case.
Yes. Except in specific circumstances, all government service must be put for bid, so the government is in principle considering any alternative that meets requirements. You might be recalling this story: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/for-most-science-missions-nasa-is-down-to-a-single-launch-provider/ but the news there is not that the government refused to consider alternatives to SpaceX, it's that every other launch provider except for SpaceX decided not to put themselves up for consideration. If there were companies willing and able to beat SpaceX on price, they could have bid on the job. None did.
It's a market, so "overcharging" is charging more than agreed upon, or using unfair leverage to charge higher than the market clearing price. So, the question is, what satellite internet service provider was offering a better price than SpaceX? If the answer is "none" then it's probably not overcharging. You might argue that SpaceX used unfair leverage because of the dire need of the U.S. government to provide Internet service to Ukraine, but I think if you were to conduct a survey, 3*retail is actually a very reasonable price for any defense contractors, because servicing the military comes along with a lot of additional work and responsibilities. It's also why government launch services cost more - the government demands a lot more from the provider than commercial customers usually do.
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