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Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventual
by jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
Every time Musk does anything these days, it further reveals the shell game he's playing with his companies. This is going to be an Enron type of story eventually. I truly wish I had a choice to pull my tax money out of this particular subsidy.
- taspeotis 6mo agoMatt Levine writes a bit about this - the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And really if you're investing into e.g. SpaceX you're not investing into SpaceX you're investing into the Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate. And most people seem to want that. Tesla's the odd one out: it's public but it's still in there, although Musk would probably prefer it to be private too.
- fnordpiglet 6mo agoTesla is the free cashflow play that is probably the most important for mars as there is no distilled fermented dinosaur juice on mars, but considerably more by ratio of lithium / oil than the Earth. Our flintstone fire mobiles won’t work so well there, and battery / solar will be important there for everything, including mobility and armies of slave robots.
- monocasa 6mo agoMars gets less sunlight on a good day for solar power; the inverse cube law really hits you harder than you'd think. And that's before accounting for the planet wide dust storms that can last for months. We're probably looking at nuclear fission generators to get started, then converting to geothermal at any appreciable (and maybe fusion, inshallah).
- fnordpiglet 6mo agoRegardless, fission, geo, fusion don’t fit well on a rover. The boring company makes the tunnels, Tesla makes the vehicles and robots, and batteries. Likely we will still use solar despite poor relative performance for bootstrap.
- monocasa 6mo agoRTGs do. That's what Perseverance and Curiosity use today.
- utopiah 6mo agoRight, right, all those facts... that's nothing compare to Musk's genius and will! /s
- mandeepj 6mo ago> Elon Musk Mars Conglomerate That’s SpaceX’s version of Tesla’s self driving car pipe dream Edit - I use self-driving car and Autopilot interchangeably
- ignoramous 6mo agoIsn't Tesla FSD good enough and trending in the right direction to be called a "pipe dream"?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jamiequint 6mo agoIt's so pipe-dreamy that I used it for an hour today through SF rush hour traffic. Clearly never going to work though, right? right???
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo agoDid you follow Tesla's published instructions on how to use it (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB60804-9CEA-4F4B-8B04-09B991368DC5.html https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-2CB6080...)? You're explicitly forbidden, for example, from assuming that it's going to make the right decision at intersections; you must manually inspect each intersection and evaluate whether it's "safe and/or appropriate" to continue. You're also not allowed to look away from the road or use your phone. YMMV, but to me that level of required attention doesn't match the term "self-driving". What I see a lot of people do, unfortunately, is reconcile this contradiction by not following the published limitations of the "Full Self-Driving (Supervised)" product. They assume that Elon Musk wouldn't call it that if it couldn't be trusted to do what they expect. Then they get into fatal crashes, and someone sues, and Tesla argues that they can't be held accountable for bad drivers who don't follow the rules.
- jamiequint 6mo agoYour claim was that the product doesn't work, and I'm telling you it works without intervention consistently and in complicated traffic situations. Any argument about how people don't pay enough attention since it isn't yet certified as a L4 system is irrelevant and tangential to the point.
- laughing_man 6mo agoI'm not sure I follow, here. What about this makes you think this is a shell game?
- bko 6mo ago[flagged]
- laughing_man 6mo agoTesla isn't that profitable, but SpaceX is likely generating boatloads of cash. From what I can tell Starlink alone has a free positive cash flow of about $2 billion. I'm not sure what the launch business is worth, but it's likely a lot given the absence of domestic competition. I have a suspicion the reason Musk wanted to combine SpaceX and X.ai is the latter gives him losses to write off against all that cash from the former plus a chance for a big AI payoff.
- noncoml 6mo ago[flagged]
- kube-system 6mo agoThere's a few ways They're prepping for an IPO and there have been some anonymous insider reports of the figures in the press There are industry estimates Much of their income comes from public contracts
- noncoml 6mo agopointers?
- laughing_man 6mo agoIn 2024 Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink had a $600 million positive free cash flow based on $8.2 billion in revenue. Last year revenue estimates from both SpaceX and from outside people adding up new military contracts came out to about $11.8 billion. Their fixed costs haven't gone up much, so the big unknown is development costs for military contracts. I think $2 billion is a reasonable, conservative estimate.
- 6mo ago
- kakapo5672 6mo agoTesla is profitable, as a matter of public record. And SpaceX is, by all accounts, extremely profitable.
- boshalfoshal 6mo agoSpaceX is _not_ profitable by most reasonable measurements of accounting. If you discount rocket depreciation costs and R&D, then yeah its profitable from starlink revenue.
- geertj 6mo agoSpaceX reuses its boosters 20+ times. Surely the depreciation is tiny when compared to the revenue of 60M+ per launch?
- computerex 6mo agoWhat about the R&D costs of blowing up vehicle after vehicle?
- jdross 6mo agoThey have over 300 falcon 9 launches in a row now, just in case you’re not caught up on the latest
- metabagel 6mo agoC'mon, you know they're talking about Starship.
- inemesitaffia 6mo agoIt's less than the yearly cost of ground stations (just under 1 million/year per installation) 5 million over 5 years capex+opex. Mostly opex It's also a troll post
- 6mo ago
- cramsession 6mo agoEnron was absolute peanuts compared to the financial fraud Musk has been executing (with the apparent blessing of the SEC). At its peak Enron had a roughly $70B market cap, TSLA is currently sitting at $1.74T. We can expect similar numbers from the SpaceX IPO.
- rsanek 6mo agoIt's hard to compare these numbers directly since valuations have increased quite a bit since a quarter century ago. As a proportion of the S&P 500, Tesla (2.3%) is about 4x of Enron at that $70b (0.6%).