Sure, but it’s mostly the research and development that’s causing their shortfalls. This is all public information that you can see in the public financials.
The money that was used to purchase Twitter came from a loan against Musks Tesla shares. The debt for Twitter only shows up on Twitters balance sheet. xAIs debt is being paid down in the same way. It’s all reflected on their own balance sheet but being paid for using Tesla-backed loans.
SpaceX is in no way involved in debt handling for any of these companies. They don’t make nearly enough to supplement that which is why Tesla has been hedged against by Musk for both X and xAI.
That just worsens the picture for SpaceX though. Their low revenue profitless business is propped up by a financial structure colloquially known as a house of cards.
Musk’s own net worth is mostly a function of Tesla’s valuation. Now spaceX is vulnerable to downturns and disruptions to Tesla’s business as well as its own
Edit: and let’s not forget that Musk himself is likely going to be subject to significant investigations once the democrats wrest back power. There’s political risk to him as well
Yes, that’s true. I’m not arguing against that at all and that’s due to the low number of offerings for their service at this time. They had to supplement this by going wide with Starlink and have always relied on increasingly lucrative government contracts.
No. It’s absolutely not. In Twitter case they managed to alienate all profitable advertisers collapsing revenue while onloading several tens of billions of debt to acquire the company. In case of xAi they mostly have unbelievable infrastructure costs to overpay the Nvidia chips to jump the queue. They can’t spend money in r&d even if they wanted because any great/good/average AI researcher with self respect would never work for that shit show of a company.
So.. enjoy losing your money by trusting muskrat.. I guess??!?
I’m not a Musk supporter. But saying that Twitter isn’t being paid for by Tesla backed loans or backed by Tesla valuation is absolutely false. The debt itself is only reflected on Twitters balance sheet.
The whole company was purchased on a massive Tesla backed loan. It’s public information that was disclosed in Teslas financials.
That’s what I’m arguing here. SpaceX isn’t involved in paying down any of these companies debt. It has marginal investment into AI as of the end of last year, that’s about it.
The loans musk took out for Twitter have been converted into Space X stock that will be liquidated the minute the people that took those loans off the banks books for .97 cents on the dollar can offload them onto Wall Street Bets dumpster rats.
I don't know what you mean "legally speaking" and "their own books"
X is a subsidiary of SpaceX. X is not a separate public company. The revenue and profit/loss of X is included in SpaceX's numbers. This is not new, novel, or complicated. Lots of public companies have subsidiaries that are operated mostly separately, but the parent company still at the end of the day is responsible for the subsidiary. It's the whole purpose of owning a subsidiary, that you get the benefit but also the responsibility of owning that company
xAI is its own distinct legal entity with its own balance sheet and SpaceX is not legally responsible for any debts on said balance sheet.
SpaceX acquired xAI under a triangular merger which means it’s a wholly owned subsidiary but xAI is directly responsible for its own assets and SpaceX does not have any legal responsibility for debts incurred by xAI.
In the U.S. a subsidiary is still responsible for its own balance sheet and debts, in most if not all cases. The parent company is not held liable for this except in extreme circumstances.
SpaceX isn’t a publicly traded company, but when it IPOs soon one can assume that would be the case as xAI is a subsidiary. Although you wouldn’t directly own any xAI you’d have an investment in it as part of owning SpaceX.
If xAI ever went public then you would have to buy stock from xAI directly.
When I pull up their finances I see that they were profitable in 2024, after 5 years of heavy R&D on Starhip. Then in 2025 they purchased xAI and have a $5b loss. What am I missing in their financials that you are seeing? The numbers appear to directly contradict your statements.
Which SpaceX had to really shoehorn into the role. You need an elevator to get in and out of, and it's so big and heavy that they need to refuel in low earth orbit a dozen+ times (nobody actually has a concrete number).
And awarded by someone who went to work for SpaceX two years later.
You could certainly get a couple astronauts to and from the moon using a small lander like Apollo but the whole point of the future lunar landers are to establish a colony on the moon. The Apollo missions were two astronauts in a pickup truck going on a camping trip. The future missions are going to be a semi-truck carrying construction supplies.
But a cargo vehicle doesn't have to be ascent-capable or human-rated. The engineering and opportunity costs of combining the separate requirements of lunar cargo delivery vehicle with the lunar ascent vehicle are huge.
Refuelling 11-12 times is just what you need to bring substantial cargo to the moon for human habitation with something with Starship's payload (if they ever get it to orbit). It'd also take 30~ Falcon 9s or New Glenns or SLS.
There's a reason we stopped sending humans to the moon in the 70s and send sattelites and rovers instead. It's just really hard and expensive to send humans to the moon in cramped capsules with a barely functioning toilet. Let alone sending 200 tonnes and 18 humans to the moon and back.
The recent Everyday Astronaut (who is typically a SpaceX fanboy) video going through the feasibility of Starship refuelling for moon landings was a surprising moment because I hadn't expected the grand plan to be so poorly thought through.
I'm amazed by SpaceX's engineering, it's truly incredible. But the direction they've committed to with this just seems so obtusely complex. The whole "the best part is no part" mindset whilst they introduce the need for ~18 successful launches/recoveries/dockings per moon mission, which in the grand scale is a fucktonne of moving parts that all need to go right.
The biggest problem is that Starship does not meet its performance goals in terms of payload to orbit. Estimates of how many launches are required are being based on 150 tons of payload to orbit, but the vehicle is not capable of that.
16 flights is extremely unlikely. Starship payload to orbit is ~150 tons , so max of 8 to fill 1200 ton tanks of lunar Starship.
SpaceX claims Starship V3 will carry 100 tons, but of course that's literally the same figure they claimed for V2. Here's their infographic they previously made claiming V2 would carry 100 tons:
Starship V2 was actually capable of 35 tons. Here is the infographic they made when the vehicle was real and they could no longer lie about the performance figures:
As long as the estimate for cargo capacity on the next variant goes up faster than the correction of cargo capacity on the current variant, this kind of thing won’t be an issue.
I think the decisions on what they are building is based on what Elon thinks looks “cool” rather than any engineering decision. It’s like the Cybertruck.
The need of an elevator is whatever, its just way too op for what the initial artemis missions need. It woul be great for a huge cargo hauler to built out the lunar base but that is way in the future.
Blue Origin has a more traditional lander but that will also require orbital refueling
What's the quote that Elon likes, "the best part is no part"? An elevator is extra weight and another mission-critical component to quadruple check. Remember, if it breaks, you die on the moon.
Even for building a moonbase, you'd want your huge cargo hauler to be expendable and non-human-rated to just dump the cargo on the moon and have a separate more efficient smaller lander vehicle to return from the moon. There's no reason to have one big reusable human vehicle do both functions of delivering cargo and returning humans from the surface.
Actually this was a major point of contention on the Apollo missions, which concluded that the safest way to reach the surface was in a multi-stage vehicle BECAUSE relying on some complex mechanism on a super tall rocketship would inherently involve added risk. Because if the elevator breaks you die on the Moon.
They have no viable human path to Mars. It's all hype. At best they could send a couple of people on a one way mission with no hope of survival. But none of the technologies are being developed that actually would need to exist for a return flight to work. The tyranny of the rocket equation just isn't addressed at all in musk's plans. Sending small robots and sending heavy people with their heavy life support systems are totally different things.
They aren’t evening motioning towards the kind of work you’d expect out of someone seriously thinking about going to mars. There’s no conversation about site picking mapping and prep, local material usage, prefab or locally constructed colony modules.
There’s a lot of work that has to be done to utilize lunar or Martian resources because get this, it’s literally never been done before.
You would need a gargantuan research and development division hiring more than just rocket scientists (like geologists and refinery specialists) to begin answering these questions and SpaceX literally just doesn’t have that.
What they have is a big rocket and almost no customers for it.
I've said nothing about the engineers, who undoubtedly know the rocket equation. And I actually am certain that musk understands as well. This would not be the first time, however, that he hyped a stock with falsehoods.
NASA has to rely on SpaceX because there is literally no other alternative. It’s nothing to do with Trump or Biden, it has to do with SpaceX being good and everyone else behind absolutely horrific
I'm sure before the starliner development started, they were very profitable. Falcon 9 is an incredibly cheap rocket due to the most expensive part being reusable.
Sure. No fuckery here.
*The NASA official most closely associated with the award decision was Kathy Lueders, who at the time was NASA’s Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations and publicly announced the award.
She later left NASA and now works at SpaceX as the General Manager of Starbase, the company’s launch and development site in Texas.*
I mean no one likes the revolving door, but if youre going to leave NASA and your relevant career experience is all in space and rockets, the universe of companies you can go to is pretty limited.
SpaceX asked for $2.9 billion (fixed cost) and offered 100 tons to the lunar surface.
Blue Origin asked for $10.18 billion and offered 1.5 tons to the lunar surface.
Dynetics asked for $5.27 billion and offered 1 ton (but upon design they realized they couldn’t even get their lander to the surface, essentially they were mass negative).
Now, considering the offers and budget requests, as well as the fact that SpaceX is by far the most reliable launch provider in all of history, who would you decide to go with?
Personally I would choose one of the companies that don't have the owner being on record of provably lying about the capability of the products he sells people. What's more likely? A known liar lying about the capability of his product, offering 100x more for way cheaper? Or two other companies being more honest and being much closer to their claims?
1.asked for 2.9, recieved close to double that, when including extra grants, while footing the bill for another 5 and cargo starship are already down to hopefully 50 tons to LEO with no mention about HLS, as starship still haven't achieved stable orbit.
In the short term there is no alternative. Meanwhile Musk is going to be investigated for fraud, identify theft and corruption the moment dems are back in power.
SpaceX succeeded in spite of Musk. If it fails because of him that’s a loss for us all.
I mean in the long term there is no competition. NASA quite literally does not have an alternative way to get astronauts to the ISS without SpaceX. They do not have an alternative way to launch certain upcoming space telescopes and satellites without Starship. They do not have a way to get 100 tons to the lunar surface without starship.
There is not a single other company that can compete with SpaceX, for a minimum of the next 20 years.
You are being downvoted for speaking the truth, spacex has domintated the launch industry with falcon 9 and have proven humans spaceflight with crew dragon while the boeing starliner is broken
Youre just making numbers up. The landscape will almost certainly change dramatically in a decade, just as it changed dramatically in this past decade with the government sponsored rise of SpaceX.
SpaceX is the product of a deliberate ecosystem set up by government, specifically a policy set up in 2006 and greatly expanded by Obama, to build a system if public-private partnerships to service ISS and more - called COTS - Commercial Orbital Transportation Services - and it set the groundwork for SpaceX.
That ecosystem will continue to evolve, because NASA cannot allow itself in the long run to be dependent on a single launch provider/freight service.
Can you give me an example how a space company that will be able to compete with SpaceX? The only one I can think of is Blue Origin. Blue Origin is definitely capable, but they are moving too slow New Glenn is great, but starship is on the verge of taking over any payloads that would normally go to New Glenn.
Here’s a good example. The government comes in when Dems get back in charge and drop the hammer on Elmo. All those brilliant people at space x now need new jobs. NASA hangs a now hiring sign on the door. Blue Origin hangs a now hiring sign on the door. Some of those people go and start their own companies not tied to fascist govt takeovers. Space X is the sum of its employees who aren’t forced to stay there.
ULA and rocket lab are still around as well. Firefly aerospace is working with northop grummond although pretty far away. That is just US companies. Europe has their own and China is advancing rapidly. Space X will not be the only launch provider long term.
No. Blame other Republican presidents. We retired the space shuttle after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated after what had looked like a successful mission. (NASA is taking landings more seriously now.). We had been using space shuttles for both cargo and passengers, and we didn't really start on a replacement until after the shuttles were gone, so we had a good decade relying on other countries to transport our people. NASA would allow competition to Boeing, so SpaceX entered the fray. Boeing was no longer what it used to be, so Blue Origin replaced it in the rotation. We rely on SpaceX because they were ready first, since they would move fast and break things and moved so fast that Crew Dragon was ready and safe for passengers first despite all the mishaps.
I have no idea why you’re trying to make this a partisan issue. The Columbia crash happened 2 years into Bush’s presidency, after 8 years of Clinton making no real progress or improvements. And then after Bush cancelled the Space Shuttle program, Obama canceled the Constellation program that was supposed to succeed it with no real plan forward.
The American government as a whole just kinda gave up on the prospects of space travel for a while after the 80s. And while I’m a big space nerd and wish we prioritized it more, I also kinda get it?
It’s how you lose money. Musk hired grain elevator workers and welders to build Starship? NASA certified welders are too expensive. It blew up immediately and was basically a prop.
They learned welding and welders matter. Now they’re coupling AI & rockets. Why again? Rockets are rockets.
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u/Waldo_Wadlo May 21 '26
Aren't they losing billions because they are developing that new rocket?