Clickbait title, I apologize but its Rule5 to keep the original titles.
This article performs a business analysis on Elon Musk, and where the money seems to have been going with regards to Tesla, SpaceX, and of course Twitter this year. With $1.3+ Billion interest payments coming up, Twitter is likely low on cash soon.
It seems premature to call Elon out (ie: the clickbait title is too clickbait), but this article makes a good case why Elon’s financial situation across these companies is in trouble.
With regards to Tesla itself: Cybertruck is a dud that is only there to hype the stock price at this juncture. With only 10 deliveries from the delivery event, “2024” for the start of the limited production $80,000 model and an unknown “2025” date for the cheaper mass production model, there’s no hope for Cybertruck to be financially relevant any time soon.
With Rockets exploding at SpaceX, with Tesla ramping up production (ie: $$$$$$ spent), and Twitter losing $Billions/year on interest alone (let alone all the other costs going on), the article suggests that a Twitter bankruptcy is in Elon’s best interest to keep things moving.
An interesting argument, we will see how it plays out over the next year.
The entire Artemis program is on very shaky foundations in funding, technology and timelines. SpaceX is only part of the picture here.
My overall point is that “promise the impossible” and then “fail but take people’s money for 10 years” is a fucking stupid way to run our society.
There’s a bit of fault on NASA here. But everything Musk does is of this pattern. Battery swap? Tesla humanoid robots? Dojo? Boring Company?
Starship is just a very small piece of this problem, but its yet another example of this pattern. I dunno when people will recognize how stupid this all is. You should only fund project that have a realistic chance, and its the visionary’s job to convince you that every step is realistic. And yes, its the Royal “you”, a lot of the funding here is from the Stock Market and driven by individuals throwing money at Elon Musk.
There are non-monetary costs associated with Starship. Boca Chica was an animal sanctuary full of endangered species (actually, it still is an animal sanctuary, just no one gives a shit anymore), it was only supposed to be a test center for smaller rockets (less noise / less damage when smaller rockets get launched). We’re well into scope creep and real environmental damage is occurring now and is well documented. The noise complaints from the human neighbors have gone up as the rockets get louder and louder, they didn’t even properly buy out the nearby houses because all the calculations were done on far smaller / less noisy rockets.