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Starship Is Going Nowhere
A devastating revelation.
One of the few upsides to SpaceX’s rapidly approaching IPO is that we finally get to glimpse the murky world of its obscure finances. They are legally obligated to show us how cash moves through this beast, and the picture painted by the recent filings is not pretty. You see, from orbital data centres to Starlink, NASA missions, and even Musk’s fabled anarcho-capitalist feudal settlement on Mars, Starship is critical to unlocking SpaceX’s future. Yet, these IPO filings only highlight that it is a biblically expensive mess going nowhere fast. But I don’t think people realise just how damning this revelation is, because it proves that Starship is nothing more than a hopeless money pit.
The Gap
Let’s start with this revelation. Reuters reported that, according to SpaceX’s IPO filings, the company has spent more than $15 billion on Starship so far. That validates my previous estimate that Starship “costs are close to $10 billion, if not significantly more”. Now, in our current crazy times, that might not sound especially expensive, but it is. For some context, Falcon 9 cost just $400 million to develop, and the initial budget for Starship was $5 billion. So, Musk has already blown the budget more than two times over.
