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by Anechoic 1200 days ago
runs the biggest rocket company

That would be Boeing Defense, Space & Security (50,000 employees and $23.3 billion in revenue vs 12,000 employees and $2 billion revenue)

runs one of the biggest car companies.

Tesla, with it's $81 billion in revenue, doesn't even crack the the top ten.

just eliminated rare earth metals for new generation of motor

Just announced it would eliminate rare earth metals. This will be a great thing if/when it happens, but it hasn't happened yet.

runs Twitter which is undeniably more active and popular than ever.

Annual users appears to be up, but down in the US [0]. But if we use annual users as a proxy for "active and popular" then I'll give this to you.

So, 1 for 4.

[0] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

Edit: taking chroma’s post at face value, you’re at 50%.

1 comments

SpaceX is a private company so they don't publish revenue numbers. Also your revenue estimate is from 2018. Current estimations put their 2022 revenue at $3.2B. And BDS does much more than orbital rocket launches. They are the third largest defense contractor in the world. Most of their revenue comes from manufacturing aircraft. Except for ICBMs, BDS's orbital launches are conducted by ULA, which has less revenue and fewer employees than SpaceX.

But employee count and revenue aren't the most accurate way to compare the two companies. The best metric is, "How much payload did you launch to orbit?" Last year SpaceX sent twice as much mass to orbit as the rest of the world combined. They have landed more rockets than ULA has launched. SpaceX also holds the record for most consecutive orbital launches without a partial or complete mission failure. This year they have averaged one orbital launch every 4.5 days. ULA has not launched a single time this year.

There are many good criticisms of Elon's companies, but it's silly to claim that SpaceX isn't the biggest rocket company.