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Musk wants to merge SpaceX with xAI, then take it public (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Or maybe Tesla

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMKyocHwUJI&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260202-musk-wants-to-merge-spacex-with-xai-then-go-public - podcast

time: 5 min 18 sec

UPDATE: the merge has gone through, apparently for "$250 billion" of imaginary value of private company equity

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[–] -5 points 9 months ago (7 children)

I'm using the success rate of the Falcon 9 rocket and how many launches they do as my metrics. If they're not doing well financially then they're making some questionable financial decisions.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago*

    Remember there’s the bit of spacex that runs a successful commercial rocketry program, but also the bit of spacex that keeps blowing up stupid giant rockets.

    All of musk’s companies have to support one of his idiotic pet projects… tesla got the cybertruck, x got grok, spacex got starship. None of them can be stopped, because they’re his and he’s personally invested in them. His flunkeys can only make questionable financial decisions around those projects, because he will fire them if they don’t.

    Tesla is struggling and is trying to sidestep into humanoid robotics (a different kind of stupid idea), x was always a money sink, and now elon is concerned that his ai waifu might die without an injection of sweet government cash. It isn’t clear he’s capable of giving a shit about the consequences of any of this.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    I mean Starship is a VERY questionable financial decision the way they are running it. The falcon program is another matter. It's actually remarkable how the two of them are almost diametrically opposed in how they are run.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    @BioMan Falcon 9 launches are reportedly sold for $60-80M (or $160-200M for Falcon Heavy). But an F9 launch in Starlink configuration is billed internally at just $12M, for the same payload as a Saturn 1B. Which is just insane (S1B cost $55M per flight in 1972, or $425M today).

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    I mean I dunno if any internal numbers are meaningful at all as anything but accounting fictions. But the cost of the falcon 9 to external customers is believable, even if they are potentially subsidized by funding rounds, and impressive. Near as I can tell it comes from accepting trade-offs: they accept low specific impulse and thus declining performance at high velocity for cheap engines, they accept an overpowered oversized upper stage to have only one engine assembly line and to shift some of the burden to the upper stage that optimally would be on the first without reuse, they accept that entering at 2 km/s is way easier than entering at 8 km/s and don't try to recover the second stage, they accept the steep payload penalty of recovering the first stage. Starship on the other hand tries to brute-force through every trade-off - meaning theyre trying to push their engines through all sanity, the second stage is heavy and bulky and comically oversized, and theyre trying to have a big empty fuel tank be a heat shield which not even the shuttle ever tried.

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