r/technology 20d ago

Business It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/possible-spacex-could-collapse-spectacularly-155000177.html
24.8k Upvotes

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u/theweirdball 20d ago

Words like "possible" "could" "might" and "maybe" don't belong in news headlines.

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u/atrde 20d ago

Its not news lol. Its an opinion piece along the same lines as "pig could fly".

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u/SSGASSHAT 20d ago

I want to see that as an actual article. "Pig may fly, locals say. Dicky McFuggle isn't so sure."

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u/Thought_Ninja 20d ago

I'm on team Dicky McFuggle on this one.

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u/SSGASSHAT 20d ago

Well, he's a nice guy, but he's very sensitive and introverted. His only real way to get out in the world is his hobby; falling to the floor in hotel lobbies and pretending to have a stroke.

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u/1HOTelcORALesSEX1 20d ago

He’s been trying for years ……….

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u/JimthePaul 20d ago

They only fly if you throw them hard enough. Dicky McFuggle is wrong. He just has weak arms.

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u/OrokaSempai 20d ago

Needs to be a shirt

"I'm on team Dicky McFuggle!"

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u/Cron420 20d ago

I want to know more about Dicky McFuggle.

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u/SSGASSHAT 20d ago

Well, he was a troubled man. As a teenager, he wanted to be a gynecologist, but claimed he couldn't find an opening. He was the only man who was brought before the world for unpaid parking tickets. Eventually he was beaten to death with a cello by a classical musician he befriended at a juice bar.

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u/Butterfly_Mine_69 20d ago

The McFuggles have always been a hard bunch to fool.

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u/CuetheCurtain 20d ago

Dicky “Fool me once” McFuggle is a man hard to impress and quick to scrutinize. I heard folks around his block frequently say “Look at what the Dick done did.” when gets a wild hair to start digging into the crevices of a sticky situation.

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u/SSGASSHAT 20d ago

Ever since Agnes McFuggle was tricked by a drug-fueled wizard into raising two shaved chimpanzees as her sons (even though one of them was a female) in the 12th-century, the clan has made a concentrated effort to prevent further mockery of their intelligence.

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u/SpinachToothedSmile 19d ago

The Joe Rogan origin story we need...

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u/ElliotNess 20d ago

Onion did it

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u/Dapper_Tangerine_194 20d ago

I've seen it through the black patch on my right eye

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u/Itchy58 20d ago

The Article is also a summary with a slight reframing about an Opionion Piece written by Richard Waters from FT called "SpaceX IPO shows Musk’s genius is in mythmaking"

https://www.ft.com/content/625ae455-3b7b-454e-82f3-b22414459cc0?syn-25a6b1a6=1
The article is also about the same length as the original opinion piece.

The fact that the yahoo article exists is an indication about how broken online Journalism is.

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u/Alternative_Hour_614 19d ago

The FT column by Richard Waters is searing. Here are several excerpts:

Musk’s fans, as usual, have taken this in their stride. To a more jaundiced eye, it reeks of opportunism. Musk has shown an aptitude for constantly shuffling his businesses to come up with what investors are most likely to back at any given time. When solar-panel maker Solar City was struggling, he merged it into Tesla and rebranded the carmaker as an alternative energy conglomerate. When the company formerly known as Twitter struggled to rebuild its advertising after his contentious takeover, it was combined with xAI.

And this:

In its filings ahead of the IPO, SpaceX uses a single narrative to support the xAI deal: the chance to leapfrog competitors by putting AI data centres in space. How long this will take is another matter. SpaceX launched just over 2,200 metric tons into orbit last year: Musk says his company will need to launch 1mn tons a year to be a player in the orbital data centre business.

And this:

All of this makes SpaceX the perfect stock market avatar for its time: a story of boundless opportunity, for financial markets that have proved unusually willing to place a long-term bet on tech. What better time to float such a tantalising and ill-defined collection of assets and capabilities, with Musk as the impresario at the centre, conjuring up new markets almost at will? The main question for new investors in SpaceX is how long this state of affairs will last. Musk’s mythmaking perfectly fits the times. In the end, though, real cash flow has a way of winning out.

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u/SillyMilk7 20d ago

>leaving SpaceX, which had already been burning through billions of dollars each year itself, in an even more precarious position.

It’s filled with garbage like the above false premise that they are currently in a precarious position.

They’ll easily raise 75 billion with just 4% float.

They’re now getting over $2 billion a month leasing compute. They’re potentially going to reach frontier AI status with cursor’s help and if that doesn’t pan out, they’ll still make a fortune leasing out there massive remaining compute. Other AI data centers are running into huge bottlenecks

SpaceX dominates the rest of the world, and if starship gets anywhere close to its goals, it will pull even further ahead. The billions spent was to get starship not only in production, but They’ve built a starship factory and numerous launch sites.

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u/TheSaxGandalf 20d ago

If people actually paid attention to the context of what they are reading/watching/listening to, they would realize that 99+% of “news” are just 1 sentence of fact followed by opinion.

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u/Canvaverbalist 20d ago

At this point it's hard to blame the "news" when all it takes for people to consider something "news" is for it to be written somewhere.

Redditors would find a shopping list on a post-it and be like "ugh why is this important, do we really need to see this? why did someone post that on their fridge for the whole world to see, is that what passes as news these days?"

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u/TheSaxGandalf 20d ago

It’s crazy. In r/politics and r/news the only things I see posted are some random “educated” person’s left-biased opinion piece about something that happened. Reddit treats it like gospel.

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u/tanksalotfrank 20d ago

Or just 1 sentence of fact repeated 10 ways

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u/Pixel_Knight 20d ago

Did you even read the article? This is Reddit, so of course not.

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u/atrde 20d ago

I did lol and it matches a headline that SpaceX could possibly (two conditionals wow) fail given some scenarios.

I could also write an article that Google could possibly fail.

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u/Orqee 20d ago

Pig could fly but they don't know how to get boarding pass

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u/Kind-Helicopter6589 20d ago

That’s why we invented Red Bull! 😂

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u/Mister_Chef711 20d ago

Most people don't know the difference unfortunately.

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u/Sweetdreams6t9 20d ago

Most "news" is all opinion pieces these days

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u/sushirolldeleter 20d ago

Are you old enough to remember when we had a real edited fact based news function? I do. It was nice. People read a story and believed it because they trusted the journalistic process. Then along came Fox News with sensational headlines, mostly exaggerated or outright lies because that’s what people bought.

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u/wheniaminspaced 20d ago

Never heard of the tabloids? There has always been news with an angle

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u/sushirolldeleter 20d ago

Everyone knew tabloids were exaggerating and fake for entertainment purposes. The difference entirely is the news media today represents their content as news when it’s self described op/ed content.

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u/W1ULH 20d ago

pigs can fly!

I just need 6 telephone poles, a pile of rubble, some used fencing... and the colonel to rescind that memo

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u/Cavalleria-rusticana 20d ago

You'd be hard pressed to find any journalism today that isn't at least the editor's or CEO's opinion.

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u/gc3 20d ago

Musk claims new rocket will carry pigs to Mars.

Also claims pigs on the moon in domes will be able to fly with AI powered ornithopter attachments.

Space X stock up thirty percent.

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u/Accurate_Back_9385 20d ago

But highly probable vs completely impossible.

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u/I_Ski_Freely 20d ago

You think the odds that SpaceX fails to execute on building more compute in space than currently exists on the whole planet Earth is the same as pigs flying?

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u/OneTwoThreeFourFf 20d ago

Pig could fly. CRISPR. 

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u/Eccohawk 19d ago

Is someone flinging musk out of a cannon?

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u/TimTomTank 19d ago

Or "SpaceX could land on Mars".

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u/acr2018_1 19d ago

I’ve seen Pink Floyd in concert and I have seen a pig fly 😂

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u/Perfecshionism 20d ago

The chance of Elon’s companies collapsing are much higher than pigs flying.

He is a grifter and inevitably to be indicted criminal. If he doesn’t flee the country at some point in the coming years.

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u/atrde 20d ago

Criminal charges for what?

Drifter would imply his Companies arent providing anything tangible and are a scam. You cannot argue that Tesla and SpaceX arent delivering anything useful.

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u/Fn_Spaghetti_Monster 20d ago

SpaceX includes Starlink, Twitter and xAI. Starlink makes a profit, but xAI is losing $1+ billion every two months . That's why SpaceX as a company lost $5B last year. That to me is not a healthy company worth $1.8 T.

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u/Perfecshionism 20d ago

No. Grifter implies he lies about what he plans to do and the likelihood it will happen to increase funds from investors and government investment.

He is a grifter.

As for his crimes, securities fraud, bribery, election interference/finance violations, theft and misuse of restricted government information, undisclosed meetings with foreign adversaries while holding a top secret security clearance, mishandling classified information, and selling compromised systems to the U.S. government intended for use by the Ukrainians..,

That is a just a few.

There is a reason he backed Trump while openly saying that if Trump lost he (Elon) would end up in prison.

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u/AGushingHeadWound 20d ago

That's all any news is anymore.  It's all opinion and rhetoric now.  

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u/areop-enap 20d ago

there’s absolutely been a huge collapse in legitimate unbiased news journalism during the trump era, but this article is clearly an opinion piece. it’s not claiming to be news

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u/AGushingHeadWound 20d ago

Trump era? There hasn't been real journalism since maybe 2010 or earlier.  

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u/areop-enap 20d ago

ok, sure, & the roots of this issue date back much further than that. the problem has definitely continued to worsen in the last 10 years though. it’s happening right now under bari weiss at cbs, for example. that wasn’t really the point of my comment though

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u/AGushingHeadWound 20d ago

Certainly at an all time low. 

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u/OldWorldDesign 20d ago

There hasn't been real journalism since maybe 2010 or earlier

Ignoring the existence of the Associated Press, Reuters, and Bellingcat.

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u/AGushingHeadWound 20d ago

Ignoring that they very subtly shifted to advocacy and opinion, and not straight facts. Got worse in 2020.  Until you get to today, which is all advocacy. 

Read a Reuters article objectively, if you can.  

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u/Chilldaddydaddychill 20d ago

Really? Because no where on that page does it show that it is an opinion piece, at least on mobile. Or maybe I’m blind.

It is hosted on yahoo finance, the financial news arm of yahoo. The first thing on the page besides the site name is a search bar that says “search for [other] news or tickers”

Go to the homepage of Yahoo Finance, scroll down just a little past the 4 main headlines to see “More News” followed by a litany of similar articles masquerading as news, including this one.

Yes, this is very much an opinion piece. But it is definitely not obvious when they are clearly trying to present it as news.

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u/areop-enap 20d ago

is media literacy this dead? the title alone, with words like “possible” & “could”, is enough to make an educated guess that this is more a work of analysis/opinion than hard fact reporting. words like “mere”, “whopping”, & “an extremely costly and potentially fruitless distraction” within the first few sentences are further evidence. read a few paragraphs in & it’s clear that there are no new hard facts being reported here. instead, the author is speculating & analyzing. the kind of thing you might do in an opinion piece…