I’m all for Elon buying it and trusting that he makes the necessary changes.
Starliner provides zero redundancy. It doesn’t work. If it did, it can’t spin up quickly enough. If it could, it has a limited number of shots for having been designed for an obsolete launch vehicle
Anyway, Boeing isn't a serious competitor to SpaceX and the money should be given to another instead. This should have been done several years ago, but as they say, the second best time to plant an apple tree is now.
Boeing is at 96bn
I was actually prepared to call bullshit on you, but I stand corrected. I figured Boeing would be worth more with all the other things it does.
Boeing is the third largest aircraft manufacturer in the world (behind Airbus and Lockheed), has been in an ongoing crisis for 6 years over the quality of an airplane that was rushed out of the door to react to Airbus's A320neo, is looking to sell ULA which is most of their space launch business, with few success stories about the remaining space-related products under the Boeing brand (like Starliner or SLS). And their defense arm has a decade of stagnating revenue (on the same level as their 2002 revenue).
Everything at SpaceX is pointing to growth, while Boeing's only saving grace is that customer lock-in, their size and importance to national interests (and national security) is slowing their fall.
The market is also not as big as you'd think.
This is also suggesting to me that commercial aviation isn't going to be seeing that much advancement going forward, rather than incremental changes at a decelerating rate. Strong headwinds, say from the energy transition, may actually shrink it a lot.
It's a critical long lead-time, institutional industry, for a nation. But a moneymaker, it's not.
(Even Airbus, if I'm reading it right, is at a USD$120b market cap)
The government deliberately chooses nore than one supplier for things with high risk to mitigate exactly these kind of issues. Merging them might not even be allowed
Also he should probably focus on Tesla and X given how poorly both are doing right now.
Elon Musk at least thinks it’s a greater than zero possibility.
But, he is too rich, too politically connected, too good at making people outraged, so chances he goes to prison are very low regardless of what happened.