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Comment by thereitgoes456 | Hacker News Reader

He has had many failures, SolarCity and xAI and X and DOGE to name a few, but he has often bailed them out with his larger ventures.

Even with his successes (Tesla, SpaceX) he has built them up in large part by bending levers of government to his advantage.

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I take issue with your use of the word "bend" here.

Can you provide specific examples of where Elon has bent the levers of government?

> Even with his successes (Tesla, SpaceX) he has built them up in large part by bending levers of government to his advantage.

So what? Thats called being a maverick. He is very very good at executing on making money which is the point of business.

> He is very very good at executing on making money which is the point of business.

Also pushing technology forward.

What failed with X? Usage today is higher than ever

Brand reputation; ROI; grok the sexual harassment bot; grok the CSAM bot; his free speech absolutism position. Take your pick.

Not to mention the clearest indication of all, revenues: https://finance.yahoo.com/media-advertising/articles/spacex-...

xAI is the most profitable part of SpaceX by far.

About half of SpaceX revenue is Starlink subscriptions. Starlink is the one profitable division; the rest of the company operates at a loss, including xAI.

That's outdated and doesn't fully include the multiple billion per month contracts.

Anthropic: 1.25B/month

Google: 0.92B/month

Unnamed customer starting in december: 1.1B/month

Starlink monthly revenue is ~1.5B/month

Isn't this to rent the datacenters though? That's not really long term revenue if xAI will eventually need them back.

Renting datacenters is their mission, now on earth and later in space (assuming they deliver).

I don't know that's moving the goalpost, SpaceX's mission was not that originally. Some could say the original mission failed and they are pivoting, Elon will say it's a means to the end of the original mission still to save face. Some read it all as snake oil

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