[static_motion]

I'm all for holding him accountable to his outlandishly unrealistic claims, but he and the entire SpaceX team are wholly responsible for the biggest advancements and innovations in space explorations since the space race. Credit where credit is due.

[WalterBright]

People thought the Wright Brothers were crazy, too.

Innovators are often dismissed as having outlandish, unrealistic claims. And then they succeed.

And, frankly, how are you going to hold him "accountable"? It's his and his investors' money he's spending. They know what they signed up for.

P.S. I own a bit of Tesla and SpaceX stock. It could go to zero, and I'm still happy to have a "piece" of what Musk is accomplishing.

The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires. Though I do understand Musk wanting to run Twitter as he saw fit rather than having to listen to activist shareholders.

Musk is one of, it not the, greatest entrepreneur in American history.

[CydeWeys]

> The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires.

You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private, and your shares would correspondingly be worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social networking company.

[WalterBright]

I'm a long term investor, and I wouldn't bet against Musk long term.

> Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private

Twitter's costs are down 80%, too. I wouldn't be surprised if X was currently profitable, though since it is privately held, who know.

[CydeWeys]

The point is, the stock would likely be down at least 5X, so if you wanted to be a long-term investor, you could take the cash that was forcefully cashed out and re-buy in now and get over 5X the share of the company. Selling high and re-buying in low is a very good strategy if you can actually do it, and you have the opportunity to do it!

But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom when it cratered.

[WalterBright]

I've held many of bags. Some of them all the way to a smoking hole in the ground. But several of the bags turned out to be winners that far outstripped the losses.

I prefer to invest in the management of a company, rather than the financials. I'm willing to see them through the bad times if I believe they're on the right track. I've been a patient investor of Intel since the 90s. But a couple months ago, I finally gave up and sold it. It pained me a great deal to do so, but Intel just seems to have lost its mojo.

Sure, my Twitter stock may have tanked under Musk. But I am willing to be patient with him.

Let's say I invest in 10 stocks, and hold, hold, hold. 3 of them go to zero. 3 do modestly ok. 3 do well. 1 goes up a hundred fold. The other 9 are irrelevant.

[9659]

And thus WalterBright describes to us how VC's make money... risk and reward.

(Hi Walter. Love your posts...)

[mlyle]

Twitter is loaded up with a ridiculous amount of debt from the transaction. Those costs are not down.

[hax0ron3]

I do not know how well X is doing as a business, but Musk buying Twitter has certainly helped to wrest it out of the hands of the left and to shift the Overton window. It could well be that to Musk, the political impact is well worth billions of dollars.

[edm0nd]

I'm curious, how does one buy stock in SpaceX? Is this opportunity only available for wealthy individuals or people who can put down 6-7 figures towards it?

[WalterBright]

What happens is some big investors buy chunks of stock, and then resell it on a secondary market. So my shares are claims on the big investor's shares, not mine. There's usually a non-trivial minimum, and a hefty fee.

I suppose ask your broker about it.

[YarickR2]

Biggest advancements ? Give me a break. Voyagers, Hubble, ISS, James Webb, upcoming Europa mission - SpaceX has nothing on that level of sophistication and cooperation between dozens of countries. I'm very much fond of SpaceX, but giving Elon too much credit does not feel right .

[init2null]

Biggest advancements in launch technology would surely be correct. Scientific research isn’t in their domain and should never be. There’s just too much political influence there.

[SoftTalker]

What is SpaceX doing that the Apollo project (or the Soviets, for that matter) wasn't doing 50 years ago. Re-usable booster stages is all I can really think of.

[static_motion]

Beyond the cost aspect that other commenters have referred to, they're evolving tech. They're the first ones to have a working full-flow staged combustion cycle rocket engine (the Raptor, currently used in the Starship prototypes), something the Soviets tried before and failed. Their Dragon capsule was also a gigantic technological leap relative to the admittedly tried-and-true Soyuz, and it also looks far more comfortable for astronauts than the Soyuz does.

[mjamesaustin]

Lowering the cost of mass to orbit by a factor of 100+, oh is that all?

What did Henry Ford do really for cars, the assembly line is all I can think of.

[exe34]

SpaceX is also doing right now what Apollo and the Soviets are not doing right now. That's very important, because they are using modern materials and manufacturing techniques and developing new concepts. If SpaceX (and soon their competitors, hopefully) manage to keep themselves in business (and they might, because of the profit motive, which is enduring, rather than national pride, which comes and goes), there's a fair chance our species might bootstrap its way out of the ancestral gravity well this time around.

[biscottigelato]

Profit has not been the goal. If profit is the goal, one'd start another eyeball catching internet application. As the joke goes, the way to make a small fortune in space, is to start with a big fortune. SpaceX is the exception, not the norm. It worked only because of the unwavering, perhaps maniacal drive of one man. The man being hated on all over the place here that shall not be named.

I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically again if somehow that man stops putting space as a priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I don't think there's any one or company that is able to push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others are making it as. Aka - "just because of government money".

[WalterBright]

Doing it for 10% of the cost.

[SoftTalker]

Costs always come down as technologies mature.

[somenameforme]

Space is a perfect example that this isn't true. It kept going up and up with NASA/Boeing. The Space Shuttle ended up costing, in total, $2.2 billion per launch! [1] The SLS, if it ever finishes, was expected to cost more than $2 billion per launch [2], and that's before we went into inflation land. Add the inflation and the fact that expected costs tend to be dwarfed by real costs, and it's easy to see it going for $3+ billion per launch.

By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch. And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost down another order of magnitude. Without significant competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs come down is if you have an ideologically motivated player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with SpaceX.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

[WalterBright]

> It kept going up and up with NASA/Boeing.

It goes up and up with every aerospace company doing government contracting.

[mlyle]

The overwhelming majority of SpaceX's revenue has been government contracting. That is starting to diversify in the last 2-3 years with more truly private launches and with Starlink, but that's relatively new, and even so government is a very, very large share of revenue.

[WalterBright]

It's 10% of NASA's current costs. Costs for NASA never came down.

[SoftTalker]

OK granted. NASA and legacy aerospace contractors were milking a cash cow and never thought they would face a new competitor.

But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today has not really advanced.

[WalterBright]

SpaceX's rockets are a big advance.

[pfdietz]

It's easy to No True Scotsman SpaceX's achievements by simply defining them away.