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by airstrafer 11 days ago
The models might be good but the product design, user story, and marketing is so terrible that it’s difficult to see it as more than an also-ran
2 comments

Even that is kind tbh. The company is so poorly run and the leader so controversial that it makes it irresponsible to build anything serious that relies on their products. Other than the rocket part of the business, everything else under the SpaceX umbrella is a nonstarter.
Starlink arguably is not the rocket part and its the most profitable piece, it held together the rocket side of SpaceX and he expanded research and development.
The only profitable part, no?
> The company is so poorly run

In what specific ways is the company very poorly run, say compared to a comparable outfit?

It's so bizarrely run that it's hard to decide what counts as a "comparable outfit"? It's a Space company crammed together with several deeply unprofitable and embarrassing investment companies the founder bought as a part of a transparent grift to cover his mistakes and his only argument is a vague promise of "data centers in space", after over a decade of promising similarly ambitious things that have never happened.

Compared to the other AI companies? It's got even less revenue and product/branding decisions that have it fundamentally incompatible with any of the customers that would result in it becoming a leader.

Compared to other companies of similar revenue? That would be like... uh... Carnival Cruises? lol the fact that it has a valuation where it does is only due to corruption and politics. Oh, sorry Carnival Cruises had actual revenue last year, SpaceX was -$1.9B.

Maybe I'm just in my media bubble, care to share the experts out there explaining how it's a great company whose valuation makes any sort of sense?

When I think about how well or poorly an organization is run, some of the signals I look at are:

a) ability to attract and retain talent

b) ability to grow the company

c) creativity and speed of execution

On these three fronts it seems like SpaceX is run pretty well, at least above average.

You don’t care at all about a leader who has been lying to his customers for a decade?
Who cares what leaders say, they all lie, it's about what they actually get done and Musk has gotten a lot done even if he promised much and more. Words don't matter, only outcomes do.
> leader who has been lying to his customers for a decade

Over Tesla Autopilot/FSD? Or something else?

If autopilot/FSD, not only is yours a false description, even if it weren’t it would not have bearing on the overall conclusion about whether or not SpaceX is run well.

Cursor is doing quite well with Grok for coding.