China (and others, e.g. Blue Origin and Rocket Lab) are rushing to catch up to where SoaceX was 10 years ago. They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.
I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.
> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.
In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.
That much has always been obvious, however (1) note final paragraph, and (2) the stock price estimates (both SpaceX and Tesla) are also based on "green lights to Malibu" degrees of optimism.
Perhaps, and good suggestion regardless, but the Soviet leadership was so adverse to negative publicity that it's hard to be sure how happy they were with hardware-rich testing.
Throwing cheap rockets into the air until they don't explode worked fine for Falcon; but given how long it's taking, I'm not sure it's working okay for Starship, and I'm now completely convinced that this is a *terrible* way to make something that's supposed to land on Mars, refuel, and return.
The whole thing really does feel like a bit of a repeat of the N1 in the sense that it seems to be a “lash loads of relatively small engines together and see what happens” effort, though the N1 was abandoned quickly. I did wonder about this when I saw they were planning on using like 30 engines, because, well, N1, but I was assured that it was different this time.
Likewise, though I figured they'd solved the "engines are a bit explode-y" with the Falcon 9 and Heavy.
Turned out not, and also that handling re-entry was much much harder than the Space Shuttle (and Buran) had made it seem.
Is this category of launch vehicle just that hard, or did Musk aggravate just enough of the competent engineers and lose just enough talent to grab defeat from the jaws of victory? Timeline's about right for the latter, but I could easily believe the former.
The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y.
Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the US despite Apple also having 3% of the world market. Putting a lot of wood behind few arrows does make those arrows look bigger.
The RAV4 is multiple models so not really the same car, BYD is a subsidised financial basket case, it wont last long, What is Tesla's Market Cap vs these companies? The market has decided with all the information it has, I'll side with that than your pedantic arguments. But maybe the market is wrong and you are correct, then you should be shorting Tesla with all you might.
I can say that about Tesla. Like, 1/3rd of their total lifetime net profit has been subsidies of one kind or another, mostly government-created regulatory credit programs.
> What is Tesla's Market Cap vs these companies?
Irrelevant, especially as the narrative being used to prop up the market cap this year is "we're not a car company, we're an AI company".
> then you should be shorting Tesla with all you might.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
What I have done is sell all my Tesla shares and put them into other things where I see realistic growth opportunity.
That way I don't need to time things perfectly for a relatively small reward (100% if they go bankrupt, vs several times better than that just by simply buying NVIDIA and watching line go up) that comes with successful shorting.
Well, first of all, it isn't. It's the best-selling EV, but this is largely due to the fact that Tesla has a very different product approach to the other big EV manufacturers. Tesla has exactly two real models. BYD and VW AG have basically too many models to count, with multiple brands each.
What’s the number of Teslas sold per year? Declining year over year as others have grown significantly. Profit margin sans regulatory issues? Peaked 2021, declining since then. Same in about every company wide metric.
BYD? Most all such metrics over the same period doubled to quadrupled. They outsell Tesla. They have better tech than Tesla. They’re clearly out innovating and outselling Tesla.
And, as the other poster made clear, your moving-the-goalposts let’s-ignore-the-rest claim doesn’t even stand slight scrutiny. Try harder indeed.
You clearly don't know the market. China is no competition just on geopolitical terms. And I am very aware of the competition and have followed each competitor basically since its founding. It will take many years before competitors will be fully read and even then their launch rates will be tiny in comparison. And by then SpaceX will have moved on.
But of course this is all dwarfed by AI stuff financially so its basically irrelevant. SpaceX could stop all launch sales tomorrow with zero impact on its financials.
SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.
I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.