Archive link: https://archive.ph/U1zEK

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 27 points 10 hours ago (7 children)

Where was this rigorous audit for SpaceX?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 29 points 9 hours ago* (6 children)

    Its result was and is aggregated by some freaks here

    https://spacexchart.com/about

    Their own numbers are documented here:

    https://ir.spacex.com/investors/default.aspx

    Including all their bullshit Musk-AI spendings. I have no idea why anyone thought this to be a good investment or a good company - they did do that audit and published the results, people still flocked (...) to it

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 27 points 9 hours ago (5 children)

    I mean I hate Musk as much as the next Musk hater, but I can understand why SpaceX IPO'd and why OpenAI would hide their audit and finances.

    SpaceX literally made self-landing rockets. They're not a Tesla or a Boring Company bullshit scam. They did something that was amazing, and still is, and opened the door to much cheaper launches into orbit, meaning they can get so many government contracts for anything they need to do in space.

    It is WAY cheaper to put stuff in orbit now thanks to SpaceX. That's why they also went for low earth orbit internet and did starlink. Their own tech made starlink possible. Now I'd never use starlink because fuck Musk, but this is a direct result of SpaceX doing groundbreaking work.

    Literally everything Musk does rides on the popularity of SpaceX actually making a massive achievement in rocketry. Tesla fucking sucks and doesn't even make the best self driving electric vehicles. The Boring company was a failure and/or scam. Starlink is a fucked up attempt to get everyone's data... Which would be a cooler idea if it weren't related to Musk but I need to have a tiny bit of trust in my ISP, sorry.

    Only SpaceX ever did something cool, and it was legitimately really cool, and the result of good engineers doing work that Musk took the credit for.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 1 hour ago

    But the way I understand is SpaceX wasn't going into the IPO as a rocket company, they were going as an AI company. Their value was absurdly inflated because it was not based on their current space launch business or even on Starlink, but on possible future revenue (datacenters in space, you see) from the AI side of the company, which came from the xAI merge just earlier this year. Even if the company itself is solid, their stocks were still a scam.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    The falcon 9 absolutely did cut the balls off of cost to orbit. Once they cleared the backlog of launches that had built up due to the cost and slow turnaround they had nothing to launch. Starlink is their main customer and without them the Falcon 9 architecture doesn't have the cadence required to be profitable. Starship is the new solution in need of a problem, so what's the problem? Data centers in space! I think they're right up against the rocket equation with starship and they're counting on trimming the fat to make it work. We'll see which dies first, physics or finances.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 6 hours ago

    Oh SpaceX core business including their numbers are amazing, I agree! But they also disclosed the whole AI stuff, including the madness of "inference in space" - the physics is then only one search away. .. PayPal was really cool and solved problems as well - and so did Tesla!

    I think Musk is like a reverse Midas, eversthing he touches becomes shit for everyone else :/

    SpaceX was by far the biggest exciting development in the last years for me ... There's still hope I'll be wrong though - hoping for it!

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 6 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

    Plus it's Musk's branding. Unfortunately people still buy into that guys brand. OpenAI doesn't really have that kind of moat. just look at Samsung and Sk Hynix. Open AI and anthropic would have similar, if not worse fate

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 7 hours ago

    It's a good point. He might have ruined his "brand" in some ways, but he always kept some people believing he's some sort of super genius, the kind of people that think intelligence is directly proportional to your net worth.

    He does some super cringe shit trying to pretend he's a genius online and most don't fall for it, but as long as some wealthy people do, he'll continue to have his brand.

    Also his stocks have made some people rich, are usually way overvalued, so even people that hate the fuck usually know not to bet against his stocks. He is pretty good at blatantly manipulating the fuck out of the market no matter what the news cycle is, and he never suffers consequences.

  • source
  • parent