I’d suspect those government contracts that are bringing in so much money are more imperiled now that Musk has declared on Xitter than Trump figures prominently in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Hence the vindictive Trump comment.
Whaaaat? I was led to believe it was a potato shit farmer’s paradise!
True. But the public sniping is not the first round in their fighting; just the latest. And the first to be fully out in the open.
Assuming either are behaving better more deliberately than petulant children is a bit of a heavy lift. But assuming that …
musk would not have tried that tactic on trump unless he a) had a lot more ammo where that came from. Like his own copy of the “Epstein files”. And b) believed that his SpaceX contracts were already as good as dead.
It would really be funny if Musk’s bickering and Trump’s vindictive pettiness ultimately jeopardized SpaceX’s lucrative NASA contracts. Tesla is already taking a hit from Musk’s discreditable reputation and the stupid Cybertruck, and Twitter is likely unsalvagable at this point.
It is an interesting article. I’ll try gifting a link. They say you need to sign up for a free account to read paywalled gifted links:
Summary: Claims that Starlink broke even in 2023 are based on creative accounting. It was set to grow by leaps and bound in 2024 before all major airlines rejected Starlink as an in-flight provider last year, Poland threatened to cancel contracts, Ontario cancelled, the Italian legislature tied up their deal in knots, etc. Also Eutelsat has a cheaper business model.
Musk’s antics are catching up with him, and not just with Twitter. Nobody trusts the guy anymore.
Which suggests that if musk happened to die of natural causes soon, the businesses are probably recoverable if they can get board members and senior management installed who weren’t selected simply on the basis of being able to stand working for musk.
But that recovery window is not long.
I didn’t have to.
Elon Musk is the hype-man who got people to invest in these companies to begin with, and (for SpaceX, certainly) has been bringing in billions of dollars of private capital to keep them going. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is a going concern for NSSL and NASA COTS launches (albeit probably only at breakeven or marginal profit) but Falcon Heavy has only had eleven launches since its 2018 debut and there is still no business case for Superheavy and Starship outside of government contracts; even the commercial space station ventures such as Vast Space are dependent upon NASA contracts to replace the ISS which is why Musk as so eager to get his handpicked candidate as the director of NASA.
Tesla is fundamentally tainted, not only by Musk’s politics and erratic behavior but also by its mountings record of defects, lack of advancement, and total failure to deliver on Level 5 (or even Level 4, and arguably unconditional Level 3) automated driving. SolarCity was folded into Tesla after losing marketshare quarter after quarter and is basically one of a multitude of installers. The Boring Company is mostly known as an advertisement for flamethrowers and its novelty transportation system on the Las Vegas Strip, with even the more recent ‘agreements’ unlikely to be realized and certainly not providing ‘Hyperloop’-type performance. xAI is floundering despite attempts to falsely promote how they were catching up with OpenAI and Anthropic (I’ll leave it to Ed Zitron to vilify that entire hype-infused industry), and despite all of the self-promotion of Neuralink the lack of transparency or publication has caused most neuroscientists and neurosurgeons to question the efficacy and safety of its developments and claims.
I wouldn’t put any mortgage money behind any of Musk’s hype empire whether he is still engaged or sequestered away in his Fortress of Bullshititude.
Stranger
My low-information personal opinion pretty well mirrors your high-information opinion.
Musk was instrumental in getting these businesses across the valley of startup capital death. Using his unique ability to generate hype & believers.
He’s not necessary, or even helpful, now. Could there be a core biz somewhere in his empire that can be turned into profit? maybe to probably. But as you say, there’s lots of fluff around the edges and if there is a core, it’s well obscured. The proverbial pebble of truth in the comet-sized snowball of BS.
If there is anything to be saved, they’d better hurry. There may not be, but what there is doesn’t have a long half-life on the current muskly trajectory.
I certainly wouldn’t argue against the position, yet somehow the companies manage to avoid the Titanesque implosion that seems like what should be happening.
These are not just rubes throwing money at him either. Oh rubes too. But some informed big investors including for big institutions.
Is there any case to be made for their actions? I don’t see it but what might I be not getting?
I wonder if Elon has a subsidiary that makes…pillows.
Well, there is a Pillow X:
Another big kaboom.
To be fair, Starship doesn’t keep exploding; each rocket explodes a maximum of once.
Gonna be hard to spin this one as a mission success.
Depending on how much pad infrastructure survived, they can brag about how much did. 
My bet is that line isn’t going to prove real fruitful.
I wonder how the total energy release compared to the Soviet N-1 explosion? They may be able to take the record for greatest pad explosion in history. Now that’d be brag-worthy.
Ref Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions - Wikipedia there’s no way this explosion gets even close to noteworthy.
Since this was to be a 6-engine static fire test of the first stage I expect the fuel load aboard was nowhere near full. Which is to say a pad explosion of a fully fueled Super Heavy would be far more impressive.
Which also raises the question of how / why the upper stage was fueled; it was the thing that exploded first, yet its engines were never expected to be fired on this test.
Upside: the got the explosion out of the way before that whole “launch and lift to orbit” thing.
It doesn’t go into a failed test flight count?
If I was a NASA bigwig I’d be desperately grasping at all SpaceX alternatives now.
There really aren’t any. SpaceX is definitely going through some growing pains, but nobody else is even remotely close to them.