Which corruption exactly? NASDAQ giving them fast entry so the biggest IPO in history is done on NASDAQ and not on NYSE who was also competing for it? Both are fighting for OpenAI and Anthropic listings as well which likely influenced their choice to get in early with SpaceX
I was primarily referring to the acquisition of musk's ai company. But the more general (and unfortunately widely accepted practice of) government contracting culture certainly applies to OpenAI and Anthropic as well.
EDIT: cleaned up my comment; removed a more inflammatory claim about corruption in the private sector.
You can't make that claim for a company that's as deep in the red as SpaceX is. With all of the VC subsidies, the cost of delivering the product isn't reflected in the price they charge.
fortunately the passive investor bagholding didn’t work, the price sliced straight through their forced buying pressure and only created more shortable shares, as people without share lending sold to passive funds that do
Corruption that stands out to me would be regarding starlink, Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites, but the competitors were able to comply and offer a better service still, while starlink’s existing fleet cannot. meaning elon still would actually have to compete and make a new starlink fleet, which he is doing now. (Basically competitors dont need a base station, and future starlink wont meed a base station either, direct to device ubiquity high speed service is coming) but before that path, he then tried to get an exception from the fcc regulation he promulgated, which was extremely grimy. The fcc didn’t go along.
> Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites
Didn't SpaceX petition to lessen the rules around geostationary power limits? Why would less rules be corruption? Because it disfavors legacy incumbents? Amazon also benefited from the new rules.
they tried to limit the ability of direct to device competitors to function, as the current starlink fleet is practically useless for direct to device. they got their regulatory change, and it didn't limit the ability of direct device competitors to function. THEN their petition came.
I still don't see how companies petitioning FCC for rule changes is a signal of corruption. Especially when the existing rules benefited entrenched companies who were petitioning to keep them. And the end result resulted in Amazon also getting a waiver.
because his involvement with the current administration after spending $300 million to begin with, and the subsequent appointments to the FCC that were being leveraged to begin bully other companies out of existence? it just happened to be unsuccessful and resulted in him trying to then get a waiver from his own insidious rule.
all you have to do is imagine being an investor in the smaller companies that had to navigate around the unnecessary rule change, and spend more time helping the FCC see why Elon was coming back to get starlink exempted from the rule
what stands out to me is that in other countries that we aren't conditioned to respect, we call the exact same interplay "corruption". there is no nuance, there is no "well its not bushels of cash in a back alley, it's a campaign donation and following the process proscribed by the legislature and unexpected court rulings", its just "corruption"
Yeah, I have put my money where my mouth is, but I think it is. Extraordinarily so, and I think the Musk hate has clouded people’s judgement.
For what it’s worth, I get it. I have found Musk insufferable for the last decade since he attached himself to the right and got into drugs, however I think SpaceX is undervalued right now.
1. They are literally the only company on earth with a reliable partially reusable launch system. There are a few people trying, but everyone else is way behind.
2. When they eventually (hopefully) get Starship right, we will see a price drop in the cost of transportation to orbit we have never seen. When I did the numbers a few years ago, the price for space mining to be comparable to terrestrial mining was around $20-60/kg to orbit. They’d effectively be the ONLY way to access that. That’s one of a gazillion things that becomes possible with cheap access to space. UPS becomes a competitor at those prices… it’s game changing.
3. They are basically dominating the satellite internet world. Nothing compares. Starlink is amazing, especially here in Alaska, I suspect they will eventually have a phone, which will be revolutionary.
4. A gazillion government contracts, Star shield, and arguably point to point QRF shuttle (after starship). The defense implications alone mean that they are going to be around indefinitely.
I don’t know, but I think people are sleeping on this.
5. A gazillion amount of telemetry data and social media data to sell on the data broker market. That alone is enough to attract another billion dollar of potential investment consistently, especially for training data and intelligence...you know, selling to the Mossad or CIA.
In a world of money, every bit you can earn, you have to earn, while I know it is immoral to sell the data for spying purposes, morality alone don't mean shit now, that I never see any capitalists and corpo dogs have any kind of morality anyway, except when massive backslash, congress hearings and boycotts, which is, ahem, Meta/Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. But given the unique position Musk used to have in Trump's government and his right leaning position he is safe to do so. At least for now, he is immune to holding congress hearing for a scandal I suppose.
And not to mention that Grok is literally trained over X/Twitter, and keep in mind Bluesky is federated and strangely, no one seems to be scraping it over ActivityPub. I believe Thread is also built on the same foundation but it's sure that Meta made good measures for antiscraping, I expected as a data oriented company.
Alas, keep in mind SpaceX merged with xAI and nonetheless don't forget their data side
I don't think anyone is arguing SpaceX is actually valuable, just overvalued and the repeated recipient of obvious corruption.
Which corruption exactly? NASDAQ giving them fast entry so the biggest IPO in history is done on NASDAQ and not on NYSE who was also competing for it? Both are fighting for OpenAI and Anthropic listings as well which likely influenced their choice to get in early with SpaceX
I was primarily referring to the acquisition of musk's ai company. But the more general (and unfortunately widely accepted practice of) government contracting culture certainly applies to OpenAI and Anthropic as well.
EDIT: cleaned up my comment; removed a more inflammatory claim about corruption in the private sector.
Who has delivered better value for money on government contracts than SpaceX?
You can't make that claim for a company that's as deep in the red as SpaceX is. With all of the VC subsidies, the cost of delivering the product isn't reflected in the price they charge.
fortunately the passive investor bagholding didn’t work, the price sliced straight through their forced buying pressure and only created more shortable shares, as people without share lending sold to passive funds that do
Corruption that stands out to me would be regarding starlink, Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites, but the competitors were able to comply and offer a better service still, while starlink’s existing fleet cannot. meaning elon still would actually have to compete and make a new starlink fleet, which he is doing now. (Basically competitors dont need a base station, and future starlink wont meed a base station either, direct to device ubiquity high speed service is coming) but before that path, he then tried to get an exception from the fcc regulation he promulgated, which was extremely grimy. The fcc didn’t go along.
> Elon got the FCC to change power emission rules to hamper competitors with better satellites
Didn't SpaceX petition to lessen the rules around geostationary power limits? Why would less rules be corruption? Because it disfavors legacy incumbents? Amazon also benefited from the new rules.
the order of operations matters here.
they tried to limit the ability of direct to device competitors to function, as the current starlink fleet is practically useless for direct to device. they got their regulatory change, and it didn't limit the ability of direct device competitors to function. THEN their petition came.
I still don't see how companies petitioning FCC for rule changes is a signal of corruption. Especially when the existing rules benefited entrenched companies who were petitioning to keep them. And the end result resulted in Amazon also getting a waiver.
because his involvement with the current administration after spending $300 million to begin with, and the subsequent appointments to the FCC that were being leveraged to begin bully other companies out of existence? it just happened to be unsuccessful and resulted in him trying to then get a waiver from his own insidious rule.
all you have to do is imagine being an investor in the smaller companies that had to navigate around the unnecessary rule change, and spend more time helping the FCC see why Elon was coming back to get starlink exempted from the rule
what stands out to me is that in other countries that we aren't conditioned to respect, we call the exact same interplay "corruption". there is no nuance, there is no "well its not bushels of cash in a back alley, it's a campaign donation and following the process proscribed by the legislature and unexpected court rulings", its just "corruption"
$500bn marketcap is still valuable
Its how it declines to that point at another 70% loss from $1.5 trillion that people are worried about
Yeah, I have put my money where my mouth is, but I think it is. Extraordinarily so, and I think the Musk hate has clouded people’s judgement.
For what it’s worth, I get it. I have found Musk insufferable for the last decade since he attached himself to the right and got into drugs, however I think SpaceX is undervalued right now.
1. They are literally the only company on earth with a reliable partially reusable launch system. There are a few people trying, but everyone else is way behind.
2. When they eventually (hopefully) get Starship right, we will see a price drop in the cost of transportation to orbit we have never seen. When I did the numbers a few years ago, the price for space mining to be comparable to terrestrial mining was around $20-60/kg to orbit. They’d effectively be the ONLY way to access that. That’s one of a gazillion things that becomes possible with cheap access to space. UPS becomes a competitor at those prices… it’s game changing.
3. They are basically dominating the satellite internet world. Nothing compares. Starlink is amazing, especially here in Alaska, I suspect they will eventually have a phone, which will be revolutionary.
4. A gazillion government contracts, Star shield, and arguably point to point QRF shuttle (after starship). The defense implications alone mean that they are going to be around indefinitely.
I don’t know, but I think people are sleeping on this.
5. A gazillion amount of telemetry data and social media data to sell on the data broker market. That alone is enough to attract another billion dollar of potential investment consistently, especially for training data and intelligence...you know, selling to the Mossad or CIA.
In a world of money, every bit you can earn, you have to earn, while I know it is immoral to sell the data for spying purposes, morality alone don't mean shit now, that I never see any capitalists and corpo dogs have any kind of morality anyway, except when massive backslash, congress hearings and boycotts, which is, ahem, Meta/Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. But given the unique position Musk used to have in Trump's government and his right leaning position he is safe to do so. At least for now, he is immune to holding congress hearing for a scandal I suppose.
And not to mention that Grok is literally trained over X/Twitter, and keep in mind Bluesky is federated and strangely, no one seems to be scraping it over ActivityPub. I believe Thread is also built on the same foundation but it's sure that Meta made good measures for antiscraping, I expected as a data oriented company.
Alas, keep in mind SpaceX merged with xAI and nonetheless don't forget their data side
You’re right! And then they’re an inference provider too.
All these come together with orbital data centers…