I'm all for holding him accountable to his outlandishly unrealistic claims, but he and the entire SpaceX team are wholly responsible for the biggest advancements and innovations in space explorations since the space race. Credit where credit is due.
Innovators are often dismissed as having outlandish, unrealistic claims. And then they succeed.
And, frankly, how are you going to hold him "accountable"? It's his and his investors' money he's spending. They know what they signed up for.
P.S. I own a bit of Tesla and SpaceX stock. It could go to zero, and I'm still happy to have a "piece" of what Musk is accomplishing.
The only thing I'm mad about is I owned some Twitter stock, but when Musk bought it I was cashed out against my desires. Though I do understand Musk wanting to run Twitter as he saw fit rather than having to listen to activist shareholders.
Musk is one of, it not the, greatest entrepreneur in American history.
You got lucky. Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private, and your shares would correspondingly be worth a tiny fraction of what they were originally worth if you still owned them. Musk has succeeded with other companies but his Twitter acquisition has been a total failure. He simply doesn't understand how to run a social networking company.
> Twitter's revenue is down 80% since it went private
Twitter's costs are down 80%, too. I wouldn't be surprised if X was currently profitable, though since it is privately held, who know.
But you certainly don't want to be the bagholder who held it when it was high (the price Elon was willing to pay for it) and then rode it all the way down to the bottom when it cratered.
I prefer to invest in the management of a company, rather than the financials. I'm willing to see them through the bad times if I believe they're on the right track. I've been a patient investor of Intel since the 90s. But a couple months ago, I finally gave up and sold it. It pained me a great deal to do so, but Intel just seems to have lost its mojo.
Sure, my Twitter stock may have tanked under Musk. But I am willing to be patient with him.
Let's say I invest in 10 stocks, and hold, hold, hold. 3 of them go to zero. 3 do modestly ok. 3 do well. 1 goes up a hundred fold. The other 9 are irrelevant.
(Hi Walter. Love your posts...)
My investment strategy is not advocated by any investment advice I've ever seen.
I suppose ask your broker about it.
But I was more thinking of fundamental capabilites. We (USA and USSR) have had crewed low-orbit space stations since the 1970s and have been sending astronauts to and from them since then. We sent probes to Mars and Venus and other planets in the 1970s. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. The stuff we're capable of doing today has not really advanced.
By contrast a Falcon 9 costs $0.07 billion per launch. And the entire goal of the Starship is to send that cost down another order of magnitude. Without significant competition + price sensitive market, the only way costs come down is if you have an ideologically motivated player. And it's fortunate that we have exactly that with SpaceX.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...
It goes up and up with every aerospace company doing government contracting.
COTS paid for vehicle development for Falcon-9 and Dragon; CRS paid for flights. COTS was a pretty well-managed program with a lot of clear milestones for funding release.
The troubled Artemis program has paid for a whole lot of Starship development and demonstration. It's questionable how well Starship actually meets Artemis needs, so this is more troubling.
And, of course, the government has bought early flights with no guarantee of success, including just to fly masses/demosats. DARPA/NASA/ORS paid for the first 3 Falcon I failures.
I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically again if somehow that man stops putting space as a priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I don't think there's any one or company that is able to push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others are making it as. Aka - "just because of government money".
What did Henry Ford do really for cars, the assembly line is all I can think of.