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Yeah, only a small portion of SpaceX's revenue actually comes from Space (payload delivery). At this point they are basically an ISP (Starlink) and a datacenter
by HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
Yeah, only a small portion of SpaceX's revenue actually comes from Space (payload delivery). At this point they are basically an ISP (Starlink) and a datacenter/leasing company.
It's not clear if Musk (SpaceX/X.ai) is really pursuing AI any more - I expect he hasn't necessarily given up on it, and he hasn't said he has, but it seems he's rented out almost all of his GPUs to Anthropic and Google, so that's not going to be much of a revenue generator, at least for time being.
It was in the news not too long ago that Musk was looking to use Samsung to fabricate "AI chips", presumably either for X.ai and/or Tesla, so perhaps he's basically put X.ai on hold until he can reboot his efforts with his own chips (& perhaps a new datacenter)?
- mlinhares 5mo agoGiven the amount of compute rented I doubt there’s anything meaningful left for the people there to do any AI.
- rbanffy 5mo agoThey can use still every spare minute that’s contracted but not actually used. At those scales, that’s absolutely massive, and more computing capacity than most governments have.
- an0malous 5mo agoI’m pretty sure he’s just trying to become the world’s first trillionaire at this point, these deals are obviously gimmicks to boost the SpaceX share price and his less-than-critical-thinking fanbase will happily oblige.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoYeah, then next move may be to have SpaceX buy Tesla with it's inflated stock, before it collapses.
- austin-cheney 5mo agoAccording to their IPO S-1 draft they are 93% an AI company and 4% a space company. Its the remaining 3% of the company that is profitable, the Starlink stuff.
- HarHarVeryFunny 5mo agoAs I recall isn't Starlink revenue at least 3x Space revenue, so not sure how they are characterizing that 3:1 ratio as 3% vs 4% ! The "93% AI company" is also a huge mischaracterization since this isn't AI business - it's datacenter/GPU leasing business which their 2 customers can pull the plug on with 90 days notice.
- asadotzler 5mo agoYeah, Starlink is about 3.5x the space launch revenue but still only about 0.5x in terms of profit. Falcon 9 is as optimized as a rocket could be, and absolutely owns the market. Starlink is a mostly rural service with global consumer pricing where average monthly rates in poorer countries drag the average down. Starlink government and commercial business, however, is growing quickly and I expect that soon Starlink will be ahead of launch, in terms of income, probably by the end of this year.
- bombcar 5mo agoDoes Starlink pay SpaceX for launches?
- rbanffy 5mo agoFor SpaceX it’s critical to maintain a steady cadence. If they don’t, they lose institutional knowledge. If the cadence drops below a point, their effectiveness at reusing rockets will also drop, defects will creep in, and they’ll have higher fleet churn.
- notahacker 5mo agoYes. Amount is actually irrelevant, since if they underprice it SpaceX loses launch revenue, and if they overprice it Starlink looks less profitable. The more important takeaways are that SpaceX's near-monopoly launch business is profitable but not nearly as big as Starlink, and Starlink is a good business but not one to justify a trillion dollar valuation
- laughing_man 5mo agoThe profit center, to the extent any division makes money, is Starlink, yes, but what we have always known as SpaceX is just a tiny side project in the combined company.
- AlexCoventry 5mo agoMaybe they'll become an AI company again after they've abused their privileged access as hardware providers to reverse-engineer Google and Anthropic's weights and operations.
- rbanffy 5mo agoThat doesn’t seem beyond Elon’s capacity to rationalise.