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Musk Just Crushed SpaceX
Yet again, Elon has shot himself in the foot.
The Musk-Trump breakup is unfurling as beautifully and spectacularly as we could have hoped. But one thing I didn’t see coming was Musk shooting himself in the foot so hard. After Trump threatened to revoke all of SpaceX’s governmental contracts, which amount to nearly $22 billion, Musk decided to retaliate by saying he would decommission SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the US’s only operational domestic route to the ISS — rather than, you know, just being critical of Trump. So, he took the already dire situation occurring at SpaceX and NASA and pummeled it even further into the mud. Now, NASA and the Pentagon have been concerned about their overreliance on SpaceX for years, and this pushed them over the edge. The Washington Post reported that in response to this, “NASA and Pentagon officials [have] moved swiftly this past week to urge competitors to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to more quickly develop alternative rockets and spacecraft”. This is far more crushing for SpaceX than you might think. Let me explain.
SpaceX’s income is currently precarious. In 2024, its revenue was $13.1 billion, according to multiple sources. However, $8.2 billion of that revenue was from Starlink. Starlink is currently far from profitable and is being paid for by its other profitable launches. In fact, because Starlink’s global sales…
