More like incredibly lucky that the global hardware market dried up for compute capacity even as his AI product flopped. Right place at the right time.

I just dislike that it is now harder to avoid giving Musk money directly or indirectly.

It’s not “black magic” to sell excess GPU capacity to third parties to make a profit. This is a legitimate business venture. It’s just not the business that people naturally expect a business with a name of Space Exploration Technologies to be making the most revenue from.

They’re in good company, competing with Amazon, CoreWeave, Google, Microsoft, Nebius, and many other players for the same business. They just invested (through the X.ai acquisition) in more capacity than they could take advantage of to get there.

Even if they manage to make a profit selling this capacity to Google, Anthropic, and others, it might not be enough to push them into profitability as a whole. That remains to be seen, and you keep asserting without evidence that it is true.