SpaceX is, for many of us, what made many of us (myself included) not realize what a raging moron Elon Musk was and is for the longest time. I've come to believe that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Whoever is really in charge has probably built an organization that is designed to insulate itself from Elon's influence.
And Falcon 9 is an unmitited success, to be sure. SpaceX basically owns the launch market because of it.
But eventually the chickens come home to roost and I really wonder if Starship will be the downfall of SpaceX. Let me explain.
Commercial space launches to LEO are SpaceX's bread and butter. There are over 100 a year now and whatever the cost of refurbishing used Falcon 9 first stage boosters is, I think the volume of launches (even if you exclude the induced demand from Starlink launches) has locked in an economic advantage for commercial launches for the next 10-20 years, in a similar way the 747 did for Boeing in the commercial aviation market. It's just that dominant.
But you have to ask what problem Starship solves. SpaceX already has a heavier launch capability (ie Falcon Heavy) but there's little demand for it. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches total AFAICT. So what is Starship going to launch? You might say that there will be new payloads once the launch capability exists.but we've simply seen no evidence of this thus far.
Starship is more complex, specifically the Raptor engines. You have two cooled propellants instead of one (because of coking with Merlin engines). In-orbit refueling is going to take so long to prove and perfect for some of the stated goals.
And Starship just isn't designed to land on things with a human crew. If a Starship booster lands on Moon (or Mars, which will never happen), your astronauts are 40 meters in the air. This is... far from ideal.
The US government simply won't allow SpaceX to fail. It's a national security issue. So I guess this doesn't matter. And it may be that the Falcon 9 cash cow props the company up from any number of boondoggles.
If Starship reaches its reliability and cost targets, it will lower the LEO payload cost per kg significantly but that's a lot of ifs and a ton of investment. But if you're not sending up a huge payload, you just don't need that. Starlink is fairly unique in being such a large constellation on similar orbits that you can launch them on a single orbit. Launching multiple satellites in vastly different orbits is not something a single rocket can do.
Starship is going to launch the next gen Starlink satellites which SpaceX desperately needs to get in the air as with 5 million subscribers their service is being over saturated around the world. Especially in the developing world and many other places where Starlink hands down beats terrestrials offerings.
In terms of Elon's contribution, you couldn't be more wrong. It was Elon's decision to pursue Starlink - a business model that had bankrupted all previous companies that attempted it. Elon's decision to pursue reusability which made Starlink feasible. Elon's decision to fire all the upper management of Starlink when the program wasn't going well - and in under a year of that decision had completely redesigned satellites in orbit. And now it's Elon's decision to pursue Starship that is a money furnace, but if it pays off Starlink 3.0 could bring in an order of magnitude more money than it does now.
The same high risk, high reward methodology with a good dose of micro-management is how he's brought six distinct companies to multi billion dollar valuations. And how he's succeeded despite the incessant reporting of his or his companies imminent failure.
High risk high reward doesn't always pay off. Sometimes you gotta swallow a Cybertruck, or a $44 bln Twitter acquisition, or a high-margin Nvidia-fuelled AI datacenter, or a political lobbying shitstorm. All of which fall squarely in the lap of Mr. Musk as the adamant leader pulling the strings.
If you're correct and Elon is to be credited with these administrative successes, then turnabout is fair play in assessing his entirely unnecessary business strategies. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking Tesla would be undervalued if Elon hadn't bought Twitter. I heard the "underrated genius" shtick when Jobs died, and then every subsequent biography echoed his personal struggles and failures he hid to prop up his cult of personality.
Twitter is once again worth $44 billion which arguably was an inflated price at the time of purchase. Tesla is a trillion dollar company. xAI is reportedly at $120 billion.
Idk man, big picture, I see nothing, but success with the media focusing on just the speed bumps along the way
- Ousted from Paypal for pure incompetence. Made money anyway from vested stock riding the dot-com bubble;
- Bought his way into Tesla then engaged in historical revisionism to paint himself a "founder". Tesla is a weird company because it defies any fundamentals. It seems to be valued between $500k and $1M per car sold in a year, which is just ludicrous. Tesla, as a company, has only survived by government largesse, be they carbon tax credits or the DOE loan in the late 2000s that saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
The only thing propping up Tesla now is import bans on Chinese EVs. Tesla isn't a car copmpany or an energy company. It's a proxy for investing in Elon directly. When Elon's relationship with the administration inevitably sours, Tesla's fortunes will sink as well. European Tesla sales have already dropped ~50% due to brand damage. The admin has cancelled an EV credit program that Tesla relied upon.
- SpaceX. This is a success. I still contend SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him;
- SolarCity. Failure. This became a recurring trend as SolarCity ended up owing a lot of money to SpaceX so the Tesla buyout was basically Elon using one of his companies to rescue another of his companies that owed a ton of money to yet another of his companies;
- Twitter. This one is hilarious because he completely overpaid for it. It seems like he was goaded into buying it by Peter Thiel and tried to get out of the deal until the Delaware Chancery Court forced him to complete the sale. By all accounts its lost 70-85% of its $44B purchase price. Elon ended up raising a bunch of money for xAI and basically used that to buy out his bad investment in TWitter, which for anyone else would be corporate fraud on a massive scale.
And what does Elon do all day anyway? Because it seems all he does is pretend to be a gamer and tweets nonstops. When does he actually manage any of these companies? In fact, his tweeting actually hurts his companies, Tesla in particular.
I'm honestly surprised there's still anyone who clings to the myth of Elon given all the evidence we have to the contrary.
Electric cars are mainstream now. Reusable rockets are real. Twitter won an election and spawned XAI. Elon is the richest man in the world. Yeah bro, he's a moron. Sure.
Tesla was almost bankrupt when Musk went to the Department of Energy Loan Office and said he had an investment from Mercedes to get $465 million dollar loan to save the company. That singular act was why you even hear about Elon today. Without the loan, he would not have gotten the Fremont factory and project WhiteStar would have been dead.
Without that loan, Musk couldn't use his wealth to reinvest into SpaceX and also would have had a damaged reputation and credibility. SpaceX would have survived, but it's development would have been much much slower. You wouldn't have Falcon Heavy and Starlink, and Starship today.
So thank your government folks for creating both the electric vehicle market and private space market! Without the government creating these markets, there would be no richest man Musk today. So thank the ATVM program authored by Senator Stabenow and NASA's COTS program. The point here is to illustrate the huge amount of power the government has to pick winners and losers. That it is the government that creates markets to play in and money to play with.
Reading this comment gave me flashbacks of every time a non-engineer bean counter rug-pulled the funding from an almost complete project because they didn't understand or trust the engineering process.
Falcon Heavy is intended for flying payloads that are very large or required very high energy orbits. For smaller payloads, Falcon 9 is more cost-effective, which is why SpaceX uses it for Starlink currently.
However, if Starship works, it will drastically reduce cost to orbit and become the workhorse for basically all launches.
>SpaceX is, for many of us, what made many of us (myself included) not realize what a raging moron Elon Musk was and is for the longest time. I've come to believe that SpaceX succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Whoever is really in charge has probably built an organization that is designed to insulate itself from Elon's influence.
Sorry to shatter your illusions, but Musk is SpaceX's founder, CEO, and chief engineer. He has a physics degree from Penn and was admitted to an engineering graduate program at Stanford but worked in Silicon Valley instead, where he made the fortune that he used to finance SpaceX.
Musk's biographer tweeted the pages from his book <https://x.com/WalterIsaacson/status/1844870018351169942> discussing how in late 2020 Musk suggested, then insisted against considerable opposition from his engineers, that Superheavy be caught with chopsticks instead of landing on legs like Falcon 9.
Also according to the book, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber <https://x.com/richardprice100/status/1728106606616015097>.
(Hint: Musk was right and his engineers were wrong. Both times.)
PS - if you bring up Gwynne Shotwell, look up what a chief operating officer is responsible for (and not responsible for, relative to the CEO).
First, I couldn't care less what his biographer said. These aren't statements made under oath. The biographer isn't even a journalist. They're a propagandist. It's meaningless.
For many people, they think Elon is smart until he starts speaking about a topic you know and then you realize what a narcissistic moron he is. Like I already knew he was a moron but when he started talking about my area of expertise (software engineering), oh boy, it was way worse than I had imagined, specifically in the wake of his Twitter takeover.
It's endlessly fascinating to me how many people desperately cling to the myth of meritocracy, either because they align with the politics of the myth's purveyors or that they simply want to believe that their hard work will be rewarded.
A cursory examination of Elon's history exposes just what an incompetent moron he is. For example, his disastrous run at Paypal [1].
As for going to Penn and Stanford, so? George W. Bush went to Havard and Yale. So did Ten Cruz. Donald Trump bought his way into UPenn (Wharton, specifically). Roughly a third of these colleges are "legacies" or otherwise people buy their way in.
And Falcon 9 is an unmitited success, to be sure. SpaceX basically owns the launch market because of it.
But eventually the chickens come home to roost and I really wonder if Starship will be the downfall of SpaceX. Let me explain.
Commercial space launches to LEO are SpaceX's bread and butter. There are over 100 a year now and whatever the cost of refurbishing used Falcon 9 first stage boosters is, I think the volume of launches (even if you exclude the induced demand from Starlink launches) has locked in an economic advantage for commercial launches for the next 10-20 years, in a similar way the 747 did for Boeing in the commercial aviation market. It's just that dominant.
But you have to ask what problem Starship solves. SpaceX already has a heavier launch capability (ie Falcon Heavy) but there's little demand for it. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches total AFAICT. So what is Starship going to launch? You might say that there will be new payloads once the launch capability exists.but we've simply seen no evidence of this thus far.
Starship is more complex, specifically the Raptor engines. You have two cooled propellants instead of one (because of coking with Merlin engines). In-orbit refueling is going to take so long to prove and perfect for some of the stated goals.
And Starship just isn't designed to land on things with a human crew. If a Starship booster lands on Moon (or Mars, which will never happen), your astronauts are 40 meters in the air. This is... far from ideal.
The US government simply won't allow SpaceX to fail. It's a national security issue. So I guess this doesn't matter. And it may be that the Falcon 9 cash cow props the company up from any number of boondoggles.
If Starship reaches its reliability and cost targets, it will lower the LEO payload cost per kg significantly but that's a lot of ifs and a ton of investment. But if you're not sending up a huge payload, you just don't need that. Starlink is fairly unique in being such a large constellation on similar orbits that you can launch them on a single orbit. Launching multiple satellites in vastly different orbits is not something a single rocket can do.